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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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Shelf i:.:i.A t 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ESSAYS, LETTERS, AND 
POEMS 



ELIZA THAYER CLAPP 

AUTHOR OK " STUDIES IN RELIGION " AND " WORDS IN A 
SUNDAY SCHOOL " 



" All these will I give thee, if thou wilt 
show me the sources of the Nile." 



; O V 



BOSTON 

1888 






Copyright, 1888, 
Bt angelica SCHUYLER PATTERSON. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



PREFACE. 



Tegese writings are founded upon the prin- 
ciples of Mr. E. L. Frothingham's Philosophy. 
All the deductions, illustrations, and sugges- 
tions therefrom are entirely original, and for 
them the writer only is responsible. 

The Poems, which give the story of a soul, 
from youth to age, have been preserved for my 
nieces. 

E. T. C. 



CONTENTS. 



ESSAYS. 

PAOB 

Statement of FtruDAMEUTAii Laws .... 1 

Essay upon Religion 34 

The Stoky of Cain and Abel 62 

Christianity and Natural Religion ... 78 

Unttarianism 93 

The Ideal Church 106 

LETTERS. 

Fancy and Imagination ...... 115 

Spiritual Laws 120 

Atheism and Pantheism 128 

Early Christian Art and the Renaissance . 130 

Leonardo da Vinci 134 

Art 136 

Representation 139 

Symbolism 146 

The Cross 151 

Greek Myths ...,...- 154 

Heredity 161 

The Supernatural 163 

Growth 168 



vi CONTENTS. 

The Emotions and Sentiments .... 174 

Holy Grail 180 

Opposites 182 

Education 186 

Law of Subjection 191 

Materialism 194 

Greece and Rome 199 

Bereavement 201 

Extracts 210 

Progress 211 

POEMS. 

Nature's Content 214 

Star-Child 216 

One Hour 217 

Day and Night 218 

To Mr. Hall 221 

Prayer 223 

The Dying Artist to his Wife .... 224 

Dreams 228 

Spring 231 

Two Hymns 233 

Clouds 238 

"The Future is better than the Past" . . 241 

To Ralph Waldo Emerson 242 

August Shower 245 

Autumn Leaves 247 

Sunlight and what it stands fob .... 249 

Prayer 251 

Substance and Form 253 

The Days . 256 



CONTENTS. VII 

AiiTHUR : A Ballad 258 

Stkuggle and Victory 260 

The Old and New Learning ..... 262 

Hannibal 263 

To Rev. Nathaniel Hall 264 

Written for a Sunday School Anniversary . 266 

Virgin and Child 267 

On Miss Peabody's Eightieth Birthday . . . 268 

Age 269 

Reply to a Christmas Greeting .... 270 

Faith and Hope 271 

Ode 272 



INTRODUCTION. 



The author of this book, Miss Eliza Thayer 
Clapp, published more than forty years ago, 
during the Transcendental period of her life, 
two small volumes entitled, respectively, " Words 
in a Sunday School," and " Studies in Reli- 
gion." They were read and ardently appreci- 
ated by persons in the same sphere of thought, 
and often used as text - books in instructing 
others. 

In the mean time her earnest mind led her 
onward into new fields of thought, and she 
arrived at the recognition of a philosophical 
statement which was radically opposed to the 
views which she bad held in her earlier days 
as a Transcendentalist. The present volume is 
made up of selections from the abundant manu- 
script of her later years. It is the expression 
of the faith which she accepted as absolute 



X INTRODUCTION. 

truth, which sustamed and invigorated her 
through many years, and was her full support 
to the end of her life. 

We are privileged to give Dr. Hedge's tes- 
timony to his appreciation of Miss Clapp's 
thought as shown in the " Studies in Religion." 
In reply to a note asking for an expression 
of his estimate of Miss Clapp, he writes as 
follows : 

Cambridge, April 2, 1888. 

I entertain the very highest opinion of the 
merits of the late Miss Eliza T. Clapp. Of 
all my female friends — and indeed of all 
my friends — there was none who seemed to 
me to possess more profound spiritual insight. 
Especially her " Studies in Religion " were a 
revelation to me, at a very important period 
of my life, of the most weighty and searching 
religious truths. In these, I can sincerely say, 
she was my instructress. I shall ever bless her 
memory. Frederic H. Hedge. 



ESSAYS. 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL 
LAWS. 

My purpose is to say in as simple a way as 
possible what I understand by " The Philoso- 
phy," as stated by Mr. E. L. Frothingham, for 
those friends who are interested in the thought, 
and yet are not attracted to his own large work. 
I wish to say that I have no superstition about 
Mr. Frothingham or his book. I do not think 
him inspired otherwise than as all men of genius 
are inspired. I think him as much so as Swe- 
denborg was, and that the law of dualism which 
he states explains the facts of Correspondence, 
which was the great revelation of the other. 

Objections are often made to any system or 
systems of thought. I must have a system of 
thought, and this system must have a certain 
logical coherence. It is eternally true that 
" Order is Heaven's first law." I think mental 
and moral confusion has its root in intellectual 



2 ESSA ¥3. 

confusion. Christianity is a system of belief, 
and if it has come to its end, see how it has 
educated the world, among other ways, by the 
intellectual meat it has furnished to the human 
brain. The mind must have something ob- 
jective to itself to assimilate in order to grow. 
It loses health and sanity if shut up to make 
sustenance of itself. Are not all morbid con- 
ditions consequent on this introversion ? The 
soul, like the eye, must look out and up. 

The essential point is the statement of the 
fundamental laws of existence and creation, 
which, if accepted as self-evident, or as logical 
deductions from one self-evident principle, must 
underlie and explain all existence, absolute and 
phenomenal. 

" The Philosophy " posits at the base of crea- 
tion two opposite spheres of indefinite being, 
which it names the infinite and the finite, — 
the latter not a reflex nor limitation of the for- 
mer, but an absolute, independent sphere, the 
inversion of the infinite. Here are primarily 
two opposite independent spheres of indefinite 
being. 

In order to pass from indefinite being into 
definite existence, there must be a union of 
these two spheres, each being necessary to the 
other for manifestation. By the universal laws 
of opposition and attraction (which laws, to- 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 3 

gether -vvitli the conception of two primal prin- 
ciples, are shown to be intuitions of the reason) 
these spheres become co-present and form the 
consciousness of one definite absolute being. 
This definite absolute being, subjecting within 
himself the finite life and law to the infinite 
life and law, becomes one with infinite spirit, 
thus constituting himself the second person in 
the Godhead, the soul of deity, the divine, ab- 
solute sphere. 

By the law of unity, every existence is one, 
or individual ; by the law of duality, all defi- 
nite existence, absolute or phenomenal, is the 
product of the union of opposites ; by the law 
of trinity, everything must exist in three 
spheres as spirit, soul, and body : and these 
together form the law of tri-personality, which 
is the fundamental law of all existence, absolute 
and phenomenal. 

The indefinite sphere of being is the sphere 
of infinite life or the Spirit of deity ; the defi- 
nite, absolute sphere is the sphere of the Father, 
the creator, the soul of deity ; and the manifest- 
ing sphere is the spiritual sphere, the body of 
deity, the Son by whom He made the worlds. 

Outside of this divine sphere lies its opposite, 
the finite, as material for creation. The defi- 
nite, absolute being having become one with 
the infinite life by the sacrifice in himself of 



4 ESSAYS. 

the finite principle or selfhood, becomes crea- 
tor of the universe by his manifesting power or 
body, who has in like manner become one with 
the divine and infinite life by the sacrifice 
within himself of the finite principle or self- 
hood ; and the three spheres are one living God, 
a trinity of spirit, soul, and body, of which 
spirit is the manifesting principle, — Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost. All creation is made 
in the image of God ; a tri-personality of body, 
soul, and spirit. 

All existence is dual as the product of two 
opposite principles, combined and represented 
first in that sphere which constitutes the nat- 
ural, and afterward by union through sacrifice, 
manifested in that sphere which constitutes the 
spiritual. Thus the facts represented in all 
creation and, consciously, in the religious sphere 
of the human soul, — the facts of opposition, 
attraction, and union through sacrifice, — are 
primarily facts in the experience of the God- 
head. 

In the very passage of the living God from 
the consciousness within himself of two opposite 
spheres of life and his voluntary union with 
the infinite by the subjection of the finite, or 
principle of selfhood, to the infinite life and 
law ; and this same passage repeated in the 
third sphere of deity or the body or Son of 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 5 

God, — in this sublime experience is found the 
origin and cause of all the ideas of worship ; 
sacrifice, and redemption, the essential ideas of 
all religions, being intuitions in the conscious- 
ness of man through the medium of his reli- 
gious and moral sentiments. The supernatural 
sphere in man, which is the sphei-e including 
all the phenomena and intuitions of the reli- 
gious and moral nature, relatively to the spir- 
itual, or the sphere of the reason, is natural; 
but relatively to the external or spheres of 
the understanding and instinct is supernatural 
or medial, or representative of spiritual laws. 
The three spheres of consciousness into which 
the human principle successively comes are 
relatively body, soul, and spirit, and the soul 
is the medial or supernatural sphere, represen- 
tative of that which finds its reality in spirit. 

These great laws, — the law of existence or 
tri-personality, and the law of creation or oppo- 
sition, attraction, and union through sacrifice, — 
being facts in the divine and spiritual spheres, 
are represented in every fact of nature, in 
every phenomenon of natural and material life. 
Thence it is that all natural and material ex- 
istence corresponds to all spiritual existence. 
This correspondence is the rational cause and 
significance of symbolism. All legitimate sym- 
bolism is founded on the real and eternal re- 



6 ESS A T8. 

lation between the natural and spiritual. But 
a searching discrimination must be made be- 
tween true and false symbolism. There are 
symbols, so called, which are creations of the 
fancy merely, the offspring of superficial resem- 
blances. They have no vital life and no pos- 
sible permanence. Such resemblances never 
produce the immortal myths of any religion. 
They come of the will of man, and one spurt of 
the fancy may eject them to-day and another 
outwit them to-morrow. A true symbol comes 
from an intuition of supernatural and eternal 
relations between natural facts and the spiritual 
law. The intuition of spiritual laws, rightly 
conceived, must underlie the symbol, or the re- 
lation expressed is fanciful. The conception of 
true relationship between the outward fact and 
the inward idea is expressed in a material form 
supplied by the imagination, and is permanent 
to-day and forever. Symbolism is the speech 
of God to man. All language is symbolic. All 
creation is symbolic. No other teaching is 
possible. Words are mere tinkle unless they 
stand for things : either things out of the mind 
or things in the mind. The highest statement 
of truth man can make is but the correspon- 
dence between natural forms of thought and 
spiritual ideas. All religions and all histories 
of all peoples are symbolic. The Hebrew and 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 7 

Christian religions are the highest myths of all, 
as symbolic of the eternal facts in the divine 
existence. To the Hebrews these facts were 
revealed in material images outside of the 
human consciousness ; to the Christian they 
were revealed in the facts of the human con- 
sciousness, the soul of man, at the advent of 
Christ, being born anew, out of an external, 
material sphere, into an internal sphere. The 
sacred books of the Hebrew and Christian 
nations are sacred through their symbolism. 
But for the symbolism of a book to be sacred 
it must be a true symbolism. Therefore, all 
symbols must be tried by the law. If they do 
not correspond with the eternal laws of exist- 
ence and creation they are spurious. The 
religious mind experiences the phenomena and 
recognizes the symbol by religious intuition ; 
the philosophic mind understands the symbol 
through appi-ehension of the law. In the one 
case the law is felt in the phenomena without 
being understood ; in the other it is perceived 
and stated. " The Philosophy " purports to be 
a statement of laws, of which all creation, in 
whole and in detail, is the illustration. 

We understand, then, that the law of ex- 
istence or tri - personality and the laws of 
creation, which are opposition, attraction, and 
union through sacrifice, founded upon the posit 



8 ESSAYS. 

of infinite and finite, as indefinite, opposite, 
absolute spheres, are repeated and represented 
in every phenomenon of material, natural, 
and spiritual life. Every thought we think is 
a union of two elements, the sensuous impres- 
sion and the percipient act, made one in a 
third manifesting principle. Even every ma- 
terial substance is a union of two elements in a 
manifesting third. 

The laws of development are the same laws 
repeated on another plane. All movement in 
creation is dual. The movements of living 
organisms combine growth and development. 
The one is from below upwards ; the other 
from within outwards. The universal and in- 
dividual forces representing the infinite and 
finite necessitate this, and act upon and in 
every phenomenon. Every individual is a du- 
ality of two spheres of existence, becoming 
constantly individualized in his consciousness. 
The one is the universal sphere, which is con- 
stituted by the principles of the mind or gen- 
eral consciousness of humanity ; and the other 
is the individual sphere, which is constituted 
by the principles of the human soul or the indi- 
vidual per se. The race and the child begin in 
the feeblest form of the individual conscious- 
ness or individualizing power. The individual 
is developed by the appropriating powers of the 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 9 

personal consciousness. These appropriations 
are made from material furnished through me- 
diums in the mind, the appropriation being 
made from that department in the general con- 
sciousness which corresponds with the individ- 
ual need at the time. This general conscious- 
ness of the human mind has three departments, 
namely : the Reason, which is relatively the 
spiritual sphere ; the Supernatural, containing 
the religious and moral sentiments, which is 
relatively soul ; and the Natural sphere or 
body, which includes the understanding or in- 
tellectual powers and the instinct or affectional 
powers. 

The primary institutions of family, church, 
and state are institutions founded on super- 
natural intuitions, embodying ideas that are 
relatively universal and spiritual, subjecting 
and educating the individual man into self-con- 
sciousness by gradually elevating the plane of 
his natural life. Left to himself he would 
inevitably go to destruction, for the instinctive 
is blind and destructive unless subjected and 
guided by a law outside of itself. 

Religious ideas, embodied in the church or 
organized religious life, are the great educators 
of the race, because they connect the individual 
with a supernatural sphere. Man, in being 
subjected to the church, is put under the au- 



10 ESSA YS. 

thority of that which represents the universal, 
the infinite, the eternal as subduer and ruler 
of the individual and the finite. He willingly 
accepts this authority, even finds his greatest 
joy in it, there being that in his own nature 
which corresponds to the demand. Thus it 
is that the highest ideas of the reason, which 
represent absolute truth and good, and the 
vital sentiments of obedience and sacrifice, are 
brought face to face with the lowest condition 
of the individual consciousness and accepted 
through religious feeling. The individual is sub- 
ject to what "The Philosophy" calls the princi- 
ple of direction in the will ; that is, he receives 
the laws of his thought and life from truth in- 
carnated in institutions, with their rites and 
dogmas, and obeyed without being understood. 

Through training and teaching from vital 
ideas, through the supernatural instrumentality 
of family, church, and state, the man grows in- 
dividually and socially, — increases in inward 
stature, becomes reflective rather than instinc- 
tive, and begins to live and move in an inner 
world of feeling and thought. 

With the deepening consciousness, the under- 
standing makes its demand for logical conclu- 
siveness and rational evidence, and the power 
of the sentiments declines. Then follows what 
is called the age of enlightenment for the indi- 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 11 

vidual and the race. Great ontologicai ideas 
recede into the background ; all forms of be- 
lief are tried by the crucial test of the reason- 
ing powers, and the demands that the natural 
affections and sympathies make for just ex- 
pression. The great religious myths, bereft of 
spiritual significance, become monstrous and 
childish stories. Man must be free. He 
struggles to throw off from his developing indi- 
viduality everything that would limit it. As 
his nature grows more self-conscious he grows 
more self-reliant, and will recognize no law as 
binding or governing but the law of his own 
nature. 

The latest doctrines of the emancipated soul 
are freedom, eternal natural progression, and 
right to self-assertion. Thus in his fullest per- 
sonal development and refinement he is spirit- 
ually in antagonism to the vital ideas of the 
reason, which are represented by the doctrines 
of subjection, redemption out of the natural, 
and the sacrifice of the individual to the uni- 
versal. Individually considered, he has risen 
through growth from below upward, from a 
lower to a higher plane of thought and action ; 
universally considered, he has through devel- 
opment from within outward receded from 
truths that represent the real and spiritual, and 
come into a condition of self-assertion and self- 



12 JsssA rs. 

sovereignty. Now is he, for the first time, a 
candidate and subject for redemption in and 
through ideas that represent the universal and 
absolute and spiritual. Now first can he see 
that Christianity, instead of being an enforced 
religion imposed from without, is the repre- 
sentation through sj^mbolic rites and doctrines 
of the laws that underlie the universe, and that 
the Christian religion is the training and edu- 
cating of the inner nature into the conception 
and observance of these laws. In " The Philos- 
ophy " there is nothing narrow, nor individual, 
nor sectarian. It deals with universal laws. 
It looks at phenomena as symbols of those laws. 
It sees religions and institutions as necessary 
expressions of eternal ideas. It interprets all 
history, criticises all science, classifies all sys- 
tems of thought, by showing their place in 
the sure unfolding of principles, the circular 
movement of human thought. As all exist- 
ence is dual, there must always be two sides in 
the natural development of thought and life ; 
that is, the human soul must be developed in 
forms of thought and life that correspond with 
both infinite and finite, the universal and indi- 
vidual. 

Philosophy is developed through three 
spheres, beginning with ontology, or the science 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 13 

of being, its most universal, sublime, and 
masculine form, and the farthest removed from 
the human consciousness, dealing with objective 
ideas conceived in the reason. Ontology has 
two sides, namely : conceptions of the infinite 
and finite represented in opposite material and 
spiritual pantheistic systems, as in the philo- 
sophic theories of Egypt and Persia ; in a later 
development represented more internally and 
intellectually in the opposite ontologies of the 
Greek schools. As man becomes more con- 
scious and begins to study his own mind and to 
seek for truth amid the secret springs of his own 
individual life, philosophy passes into psychol- 
ogy, which in its turn is developed into moral 
and intellectual schools, each phase having its 
birth, decline, and death according to laws 
which preside over the development of mind, 
invariable, inevitable, universal. No philoso- 
pher is responsible for his views or statements. 
He utters himself according to the position 
he occupies in the development of mind, and 
speaks for all that stand on his own plane. 
Man's natural development goes on contin- 
ually, but not collaterally. He is of necessity 
one-sided. He represents laws and phenomena 
that are for the time predominant in his con- 
stitution, and which must, to a greater or less 
degree, exclude opposite laws and phenomena. 



14 ES8AY8. 

His manifestations are either vital or destruc- 
tive. And the severity of this distinction 
seems to be according to a less or greater sin- 
gleness and force of nature. We are all more 
or less imperfect specimens of a type. The 
majority of men and women are not logical. 
They hold the most opposite beliefs and opin- 
ions in a heterogeneous manner without suffer- 
ing mental distress. But the philosophic mind 
cannot abide this mixture and confusion in the 
children of its brain. It loves method and 
order. It seeks some central thought that shall 
hold in solution all other thought, or around 
which all other thoughts shall revolve in plane- 
tary order. Thus it is that all philosophic sys- 
tems, starting from one principle, logically deny 
the infinite or finite, running into spiritual or 
material Pantheism, and when seeking to unite 
the two as in the eclectic philosophers, and fail- 
ing to perceive the true relationship of union 
through sacrifice, deduce one from the other in 
defiance of reason, or simply hold them together 
in illogical tolerance. The great ontologists of 
the ancient and more unconscious world are re- 
peated in later times more internally and intel- 
lectually. Pantheists like Spinoza, who posit 
one infinite substance, necessarily deny crea- 
tion, because the infinite has no material for 
creation, and development from itself, if that 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 15 

were possible, must result in forms that can be 
only modifications of infinite substance. Pan- 
theism is either spiritual or material ; either 
starting from some force that represents the 
spiritual, and making creation a modification of 
that, or from the finite, and making creation a 
development of one material power. Every 
system of thought that starts from unity or one 
universal sphere must result, and always does 
result, in denying God or the universe ; that 
is, such systems must deny either that which 
represents the infinite or the finite. The Uni- 
tarian principle in philosophy is utterly un- 
productive. Out of one nothing can come. 
The whole history of philosophy, from Thales 
downward, proves, and is proving, this. Of 
course such philosophies are utterly destructive 
to religion, and to the Christian religion pre- 
eminently. In the church, as long as it is 
vital, is always represented duality, or the union 
of opposites through sacrifice. But as its 
teachings are always dogmatic and poetic, they 
can only be received through the sentiments 
and personal religious convictions. 

Philosophy always begins historically with 
religion, because it seeks to explain the rid- 
dle of human life; but as the understanding 
develops, philosophy invariably and inevitably 
separates itself, because, being no longer fed by 



16 ESSAYS. 

principles in the reason, incarnated in symbols, 
it rejects as irrational and absurd what the 
church teaches ; the latter, as has just been 
said, teaching its mysteries through poetic sym- 
bols, and never as scientific or rational state- 
ments. It is of no man's merit or demerit that 
philosophy runs into Atheism or Pantheism. 
It must do so to the logical mind that starts 
from the premise of one principle. Religion is 
not logical ; does not reason ; indeed, antago- 
nizes human reason. She only asserts and af- 
firms. She is perfectly right on her own plane. 
But when the reason is so far developed that the 
mind cannot accept any statement other than 
on rational grounds, then comes in this *' Phi- 
losophy," to show that the essential doctrines 
of Christianity, which are trinity, incarnation, 
and redemption, are poetic, illogical affirma- 
tions of rational and logical truths; and that 
Christianity is separated from other forms of 
religion, not by its purer ethical element, but 
by being a revelation to the religious natui'e of 
truths, which are truths of the reason also. That 
philosophy in its historic development separates 
from religion is neither the fault of religion 
nor philosophy. With the development of the 
understanding, the mind ignores phenomena, 
made known only through the religious senti- 
ments, and rejects any formula of such phe- 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 17 

nomena. It is only from a vision of higher 
law that it comes to see that these revelations 
to the sentiment, covered by such narrow forms 
of speech, are intuitions of the reason and data 
for philosophic study. The old formulas are 
worn out. They are being thoroughly sifted and 
expurgated from modern thought, which is Uni- 
tarian thought. The Protestant Church, which 
is relatively soul in Christianity, has in its neces- 
sary separation from the symbolic body gradu- 
ally and surely become so etherealized and trans- 
cendental that it has lost even the form of truth, 
and has evaporated into naturalism and individu- 
alism on the one side, or degenerated into senti- 
mentalism and externalism on the other. The 
best and most advanced thinkers are Unitarian 
and transcendental, seeking in the individual 
consciousness the law of life ; or devoting them- 
selves to material science, trying to find in 
that which is less than man the solution to the 
problems of man's nature and destiny ; reassert- 
ing the old pagan doctrine of evolution from 
one material force. We are taking up the 
burden of Egypt without its simplicity and ter- 
rible earnestness. That Protestantism has come 
to this pass many bolder Protestants aflBi-m, 
and, looking on Catholicism as an effete body 
left over unburied from the Middle Ages and 
fit only to please the most unenlightened among 



18 ESS ATS. 

men and women, they wait, as they say, for new 
truth. From whence is it to come ? Surely 
the whole philosophic development of the 
human mind has issued in despair. Every ad- 
vance in that direction has carried us farther 
from what is profound in thought and sublime 
to the imagination. Looking downward into 
the face of the ape, does one believe in the seri- 
ous and grand tragedy of human destiny ? Here 
a " Philosophy " offers itself that reaffirms to 
the mind the sublimest facts presented to the 
contemplation of humanity. It shows that what 
the Christian world has passionately clung to as 
divine revelation are symbols of eternal truth. 
It posits principles which interpret all religions 
and philosophies, showing the necessary steps 
of their birth, decline, and fall ; it explains all 
religious symbolism, floods history with light, 
unites the race in a common development, and 
sanctifies and dignifies the individual story by 
uniting it to, and interpreting it by, universal 
laws. It satisfies the reason by its statement 
of law, delights the intellect by its invincible 
logic, and legitimates to the heart and imagina- 
tion the sublime old symbols of the Cross and 
sacrificial worship. 

A work has been published recently, called 
the " Nineteenth Century," in which it is shown 
that this of all centuries has exceeded in great 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 19 

industries, commercial supremacj^, supply of 
precious metals, in the steamship, the locomo- 
tive, the electric telegraph, the newspapers, 
mechanical inventions, improved weapons, art 
of healing, the lucifer match, the sewing-ma- 
chine, photography, and agriculture ; in chari- 
table efforts, freedom, self - government, and 
progress. Do all these appliances denaonstrate 
any relation between this living, pulsating uni- 
verse and its mysterious source ? Do they 
frame an answer in reply to the unceasing ques- 
tionings which may not perhaps have yet stirred 
in breasts drugged by content, but which, once 
awakened, never sleep again? Is man the 
nobler because the pain and seriousness of 
thought may be smothered in soft appliances 
of living ? I believe in the oneness of human- 
ity, not in the equality of races or of individ- 
uals, but that the human soul incarnates itself 
hourly out of one common humanity ; one sub- 
stance, but myriad manifestations. I believe 
that it begins its incarnation in this atmosphere. 
Development and growth, and not plenty of 
material enjoyment, are the measure of good 
for the individual and for the race. Man is 
created natural and spiritual, to be developed 
naturally and spiritually through the ages 
until he come into the realization of absolute 
truth. If this development come through pain 



20 ESS ATS. 

and disaster, then pain and disaster are better 
than ease and success. 

All growth follows the laws of succession and 
circularity. Drop the germ, and its develop- 
ment of form must be outer and outer to its 
final and most external expression, while the 
change of substance takes place from below up- 
ward to ever-increasing refinement and indi- 
viduality. The corolla is but the root trans- 
formed ; all that is in the root etherealized and 
beautified, yet having no life in itself separate 
from the root, and no value in itself save as the 
shelter of a new germ. 

Material phenomena represent natural phe- 
nomena, as all natural, in their turn, represent 
the spiritual. The same laws pervade all cre- 
ation, these eternal laws being themselves the 
representation of operations in the divine and 
absolute spheres of life. 

All phases of religion and all phases of philos- 
ophy must have their birth, decline and decay. 
Religion is the recognition in man of the super- 
natural element which enters into every form 
of his consciousness, indeed, but is particularly 
revealed through the moral and religious senti- 
ments. It belongs to that department of his 
constitution which is soul in his trinity of body, 
soul, and spirit. Out of these religious and 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 21 

moral sentiments, which are vitalized uncon- 
sciously from ideas of the reason, are incarnated 
through the incorporating power of the imagi- 
nation all the symbolic rites and ceremonies 
which make the liturgies and litanies of na- 
tions. All religions embody the sentiments of 
worship and sacrifice. All nature is laid under 
contribution to express these sentiments. The 
fancy follows in the train of the imagination, 
and all the flowers and fruits of the field, all 
poetry and music and dancing, cluster about the 
altars of worship, and the blood, which is the 
life of the animal, is shed in sacrifice and atone- 
ment. Driven by this indestructible instinct, the 
body and its joys are sacrificed to the soul, and 
even the soul would put out its own individuality 
as propitiation to the all-excluding, all-absorb- 
ing demand of the unmeasurable and infinite. 

These ceremonial rites and sacrifices differ 
with the innumerable varieties of human culture 
and condition ; ever ascending and refining from 
the coarser and more external forms of the 
shedding of blood to the more and more internal 
sacrifices of every form of self-love as gradually 
revealed in the consciousness. Wide as seems 
the difference between the immolation of beasts 
upon the altar and the cutting off of the wild 
beasts, the hydra-headed forms of self-love in 
the heart, the essential idea running through 



22 ESS A rs. 

all is the same : the instinct of sacrifice in the 
religious and moral nature ; the unconscious 
sentiment that the individual must be subjected 
to the universal. The religion of adoration 
with sacrifice is the natural religion of the 
human heart, more or less enlightened, more or 
less internal, as the nation or individual has 
risen in the plane of existence by successive 
births into more and more internal spheres of 
consciousness. But the enlightened Unitarian, 
who of plan and premeditation puts away from 
him in the course of the day's work every self- 
ish and self-absorbing motive, may touch the 
hand of his brother offering the blood of lambs 
and goats, or his other brother stifling all natural 
affection and innocent joy at the demand of an 
irresistible inward power, since the impelling 
power of each is a supernatural sense of obli- 
gation, the influx of the religious and moral 
nature. 

The " Philosophy " conceives that at the ad- 
vent of Christianity a new germ was dropped 
into the soul of man, an opening of an internal 
experience by which he became receptive of the 
distinctive ideas of Christianity which, repre- 
sented from the beginning of time and in every 
phenomena of human life in natural forms, 
were now represented in supernatural forms in 
the awakened human consciousness. These 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 23 

primal ideas, which are themselves represen- 
tative or symbolic of facts in the nature of 
deity itself, and thence the universal laws of 
existence, being attraction, opposition, and 
union through sacrifice, form the great doctrine 
of redemption, the glad great news to the 
adoring, sacrificing, suffering humanity. The 
great doctrine of Christianity is that of union 
through sacrifice, the marriage of the infinite 
and finite, the spiritual and natural, the di- 
vine and human, through the voluntary sac- 
rifice of the principle of life in the one to 
the life and manifestation of the other. Hu- 
manity at the time of the Advent was devel- 
oped through its natural forms to a condition 
capable of receiving internally the open secret 
of creation. The Son had been made one with 
the Father through the sacrifice within himself 
of the principle of selfhood, before the founda- 
tion of the world was possible ; and now here 
was humanity, made in the same image and 
in a phenomenal way going through the same 
process that had taken place in the absolute 
spheres. There was no passage for humanity 
from the human to the divine, no reconciliation 
between spheres so absolutely and irretrievably 
opposite. No prayers, nor rites, nor ceremonies 
could bridge that gulf. No power in man could 
unite man to God. Nothing could do this but 



24 ESSAYS. 

the formation of a medium of communication 
by which the facts of the divine life could be 
revealed to man's consciousness and made the 
germ of a new life in him, — a divine life in 
human form. Thus, it is said, the manifesting 
power of God, the brightness of his glory, be- 
came incarnated inhuman form, — the union of 
the divine and human, forming a divine-human 
or spiritual sphere of existence into which all 
men should enter by faith in this spiritual 
sphere, the divine-human, the Christ of God. 
By the law of creation everything must be 
first natural and afterward spiritual, and so the 
Christ must first appear to men in his natural 
manifestation as man, born, suffering, and dying, 
experiencing in essence all the ills of humanity, 
and afterward as universal spiritual truth ; 
the risen Christ, the divine humanity ; the 
enlightener and redeemer of the race, just so 
far as it accepts the supremacy of the divine- 
human life, of which the principle is the infi- 
nite love and law, over its own life, of which the 
principle is self-love. This has been received 
by man because there was that in the religious 
consciousness which represented this divine 
experience, and the opening of which conscious- 
ness made men Christians. As the individual 
becomes more and more external though appar- 
ently more enlightened and cultivated, he loses 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 25 

the sense of this internal consciousness, and so 
loses belief in that which is distinctively Chris- 
tian. 

We have said that all the prayers and sac- 
rifices and religions of the race were unavail- 
able to unite man to God, until the formation 
of a divine-human sphere by the incarnation of 
the Son in humanity. But they were available 
and necessary as means and modes of develop- 
ment in the natural life. The awakening of 
the internal supernatural experiences as medi- 
ums to incarnate Christian ideas could not have 
taken place until the race had gone through 
all the more external and preparatory steps. 
It is true that not one prayer nor one pain is in 
vain. Every experience is necessary to the in- 
dividual and the race. It is permitted and 
overruled by the Divine Wisdom and Provi- 
dence. The child may do his task through 
pain and tears. The special task may be a 
thing to be unlearned in after-life, but the 
mental acts that went to the acquiring were 
processes in the formation of the understanding 
and individualizing the will of the child. All 
humanity is a child in various stages of devel- 
opment. All have one book with an almost 
infinite number of leaves. The subject matter 
is one; the pages are myriad. The Advent 
was a turning-point in man's existence upon 



26 ESS A Y8. 

earth because it opened a new page in man's 
consciousness. It brought into light a sugges- 
tion, premonition, and experience of a new life. 

" The Philosophy " through the principle of 
dualism recognizes two forms of development in 
the religious nature. There is a vital and a 
destructive side to the religious and moral sen- 
timents. The moral and religious sentiments 
constitute what is relatively the supernatural 
sphere in the general consciousness. The indi- 
vidual is in a vital condition when the lower 
principles in that department are in subjection 
to the higher ; that is, when the moral senti- 
ments are vitalized by the religious sentiments, 
or the sense of obligation which is the mani- 
festing principle of the moral nature is ruled 
by revelation, the manifesting principle of the 
religious nature, and through which vital reli- 
gious ideas are communicated. Now these vital 
religious ideas are communicated either through 
the sentimental nature, while subject to the 
doctrines and institutions of the church, or to 
the reason, as rational ideas representative of 
spiritual truth. 

The point of peril is when the individual 
has come into an internal condition, conscious 
of intuitions internal to the external symbolism 
of Christian teaching, and is still in the senti- 
mental region. He then is inspired from the 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 27 

personal or individual side of the supernatural 
department, and becomes lost in the phenomena 
of naturalism in the religious, and governed by 
the law of sympathy in the moral, department. 
Religious phenomena in his consciousness, phe- 
nomena that represent opposition, attraction, 
and union through sacrifice, being separated 
from their vital law, become inverted, and the 
personal, the individual, the phenomenal, is put 
above the universal and real. The soul is lost 
in the maze of internal phenomena, without 
guide or master, and all forms of religious fanat- 
icism are the result. The individual is insane. 
All fanaticism is religious insanity. It is living 
from the phenomena of one's consciousness, the 
subtle form of self- worship, instead of looking 
into the face of law or spiritual truth and sub- 
jecting the soul to that. The religious per- 
son who has ceased to be governed by vital 
ideas communicated from without seeks in the 
phenomena of his own consciousness for inner 
light and direction, and stumbles on these dark 
mountains. It is the separation in his con- 
sciousness of good from truth, and the good 
is a demand of his nature, the highest form of 
self-love. Good is only an affectional princi- 
ple, demanding satisfaction of its desire, and its 
worship is self- worship. It is the old story of 
Eden. The woman is separated from the man, 



28 £SSA YS. 

and falls a victim to the evil principle. And 
the principle of good separated from truth is 
spiritual evil. It is the same experience in 
transcendentalism, only the transcendentalist 
is more intellectual or rational than religious, 
seeks in his intellect or mind the law of his life, 
and, unable to apprehend spiritual law, recog- 
nizes finite law, or the law of his own nature, 
namely, naturalism and individualism, as his 
authority, and becomes as surely chaotic and 
destructive to all vital forms of thought and life 
and utterly separated from every form of spirit- 
ual truth. It is sometime asked why this sepa- 
ration of truth and good in the consciousness is 
necessary, leading as it does to every form of 
intellectual and moral insanity. The answer 
seems to me this. Every experience is necessary 
to the soul's development. The goal of the 
soul's development is to come into the knowl- 
edge of absolute truth. To know anything we 
must know its opposite. To know a thing is to 
be conscious of it. Consciousness implies two 
elements, and all real knowledge is conscious 
knowledge. Consciousness is the attribute of 
the reason. All growth is from lesser to deeper 
consciousness. We cannot know spiritual truth 
unless we know spiritual falsehood. Every soul 
in its unfolding must eat of the tree of knowl- 
edge of good and evil. Spiritual knowledge has 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 29 

two sides, because the universe has two sides. 
Creation is the union of forces that represent 
opposite, universal spheres. All that is in the 
spiritual must be represented in the natural, for 
the natural is only a representation or corre- 
spondence of the spiritual. The repetition of 
absolute laws and phenomena, in the phenom- 
enal sphere of human consciousness, we call 
the soul's experience ; that is, the experience 
or passing through phenomena or phases of 
thought and feeling that represent spiritual 
facts. Now, in the natural condition of the 
soul, these experiences only represent spiritual 
phenomena. They are not manifestations of 
spiritual principles, but representations of them. 
They are means of knowledge. We learn a 
principle by seeing it carried out to its legiti- 
mate and necessary and inevitable results. Ex- 
perience is more or less intei-nal according to 
the constitution of the individual. The most 
external persons realize in this atmosphere only 
material experiences and the most external 
forms of afiectionalism and intellectuality. Per- 
sons of deep religious sentiments touch the 
sphere of supernatural thought and feeling, and 
are kept safe as long as they are subject to the 
church or organized religious thought which is 
the most external exponent of spiritual truth. 
Development is not by the will or at the 



30 ESSAYS. 

option of man. It goes on by certain inevitable 
laws. No one can actually commit spiritual 
suicide or arrest his own development. Surely 
and inevitably man must unfold from within 
outward, and grow from below upward. All 
stagnation and retrogression are apparent. 
The facts of absolute truth, that is the dual- 
ism in the eternal principles of life, and the 
destructive nature of the finite separated from 
the Infinite, the good from truth or the indi- 
vidual from the universal, are constantly being 
told and reiterated in the experience of the in- 
dividual and the race. In this way man learns 
these facts, and as in his development he rises 
out of the sphere of the understanding and sen- 
timents into the rational sphere, he becomes 
capable of perceiving the law of life which all 
these facts illustrate, though they could not 
of themselves reveal them. Phenomena illus- 
trate law, but in no accumulation nor general- 
ization of phenomena can the law be found. 
As long. as everything is told somewhere and 
somehow, every absolute fact represented upon 
the plane of the senses, it is not necessary that 
every individual soul should pass through the 
same forms of experience ; only every individ- 
ual soul must know the principle of every ex- 
perience. We know a phenomenon when we 
know its principle. Humanity is one. There 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 31 

is one humanity, and myriad individualized 
manifestations. Every individual has the ex- 
perience, internal and external, and that only 
which is necessary to his development. As 
soon as we see the law we can see its working 
out in another as well as in ourselves. No 
one suffers to himself alone. If this seems to 
press hard upon individuals who are so made 
that they necessarily pass out in external forms 
of evil, the answer is that all these forms of 
natural evil are only phenomenal, have no root 
in reality ; material evil and suffering doubt- 
less belonging to this material sphere, and more 
internal evil and suffering to a more internal 
sphere. 

All evil in the world is the result of the 
more or less false relation between the forces 
that represent on the natural plane the infinite 
and finite. This disturbance in the relation 
of these forces is the necessary accompaniment 
of the development of the natural. If there 
could be a continuous, harmonious action of 
these forces, man could never come into the 
realization of natural life ; never find his own 
individuality as separate from the divine ; never 
have suggestive material for the incarnation of 
spiritual thought and ideas. He could never 
know anything human or divine. Moral evil 
is that disturbance in the human constitution 



32 ESSAYS. 

necessary to its development. Its process is 
separation from the divine, and without sepa- 
ration no development is possible ; the plant 
would remain forever in its root. What we 
call moral evil is only a more external form, 
not essentially more evil than the fairer forms 
of good. 

All natural good and evil are forms merely 
which furnish suggestive material in the expe- 
rience. We judge of one's development by the 
quality of his knowledge. How that knowl- 
edge has been gained is unimportant. The 
result is the one great thing. Processes are 
only means to ends. No amount of what we 
call moral or intellectual superiority is any sign 
of true spiritual knowledge. Many persons may 
lag in their development because there is too 
little antagonism in their nature. There is too 
much superficial harmony. What we call sin is 
insanity ; that is, want of balance between the 
internal and external elements of our mental 
constitution, as all physical illness is disturbance 
of the balance in the physical forces. Man is 
developed under the inevitable law of necessity. 
Our sense of responsibility and free will is a 
phenomenon necessary to suggest and train us 
into the conception of freedom in the passage 
from the natural to the spiritual. Our appear- 
ance in this atmosphere is but a short part of 



STATEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS. 33 

our career. Here we make our first initiation 
into individuality. Here we manifest the most 
external forms of our life. Here we get into 
existence. We are becoming always more and 
more internal, self-conscious, and real. 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 

I CONSIDER Religion, by which I mean the 
impulse of the sentiments that lie interior to 
the understanding to express themselves in 
praise or adoration, in states of feeling or lines 
of action towards an invisible and correlated 
Presence, to be universal and irresistible. As 
soon as man is conscious man, he worships 
a somewhat that is not man. Disrupting him- 
self by the inevitable law of development 
from that unconscious dreaming which is the 
morning mist around our first foothold upon ex- 
istence, conscious man yearns to unite himself 
with somewhat, and this somewhat he conceives 
as antipodal to himself, and therefore divine. 

The urgency of this worshiping instinct is 
greatest in the primitive phases of man's de- 
velopment, in that childlike period of every 
people's history when the imagination and the 
sentiments are the ruling powers of the mind, 
and the understanding, which includes the fac- 
ulties that appropriate and generalize material 
facts, is biding its time. 

This interior sentiment of worship, although 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 35 

thus early and apparently precociously devel- 
oped in the individual and the race, is, like all 
other feelings and desires, without eyes. It 
feels, but does not see. Like Eve in the Garden 
of Eden, when separated from its intellectual 
partner, it is liable to all manner of beguile- 
ments and sophistries. 

The religious sentiment must have a guide. 
So in the story or tradition of the earlier ages 
and races, we always find great religious teach- 
ers or leaders, founders of a religion, as we call 
them. I understand these leaders to be men 
so organized mentally and morally, that is, to 
have an internal organism of so fine affinities, 
as to be exceptionally receptive of religious in- 
tuitions, conceptions, and suggestions. They 
are the religious geniuses of the age ; men con- 
stitutionally inspired to awaken and purify the 
worshiping instincts of the many, but, even 
more than this, to give a definite object and di- 
rection to these aspirations. I do not beUeve 
in the equality of men in any given department 
of thought or action. I do not believe that, 
in any age of the world (though it contra- 
venes the words of our most eminent thinker), 
every soul can " acquaint itself first hand with 
Deity." I believe in special men, — men preem- 
inently gifted to lead the race in the direction 
of the unseen realities. Such men must not 



36 ESS A TS. 

only be especially intuitive of a spiritual order 
of thought, but must be exceptionally and pre- 
eminently gifted with a pure and large imagi- 
nation. By imagination I do not mean merely 
vividness of conception by which absent or in- 
visible scenes and circumstances are pictured 
on the mental retina and given forth in adequate 
expression, though this is one of the noblest of 
its subordinate functions ; or that narrative 
power by which events and characters are 
evolved from their primary elements, though 
the narrative power is immensely stimulated by 
it ; still less, any mere perception of the beauti- 
ful in line or color, or the embodying of feelings 
and fancies in artistic forms. The imagination 
of which I speak, and which unlocks the secret 
doors of revelation, is that power which, recog- 
nizing the fact that not only all material, but 
all human nature, all the forms of our thinking 
and living, are a grand symbolism of opposite 
spiritual principles and relations, spontaneously 
seizes upon that material image or natural fact 
which corresponds to and represents the spirit- 
ual idea, and is the only way by which that idea 
can be communicated. 

The material images that most readily recur 
to the mind of students of religious literature 
are the universal physical facts of eating and 
drinking, assimilation and rejection, and the 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 37 

permanent, universal, natural facts of the at- 
traction and union of man and woman, of 
father and child, master and servant, — facts 
universal to the race and patent to the ob- 
server. 

The intellectual power that perceives the 
corresponding image, and embodies in it the 
spiritual idea, is the creative power of the 
imagination. It is the power that mediates 
between the spiritual order of thought and 
the natural apprehension. The imagination is 
not only the mediator between the sense and 
the soul, but in an infinitely more subtle way 
is the mediator between that which cannot oth- 
erwise be revealed to the purely natural appre- 
hension on account of the utter oppositeness 
and want of continuity between the two. The 
spiritual order of thought and life is opposite to 
and set over against the natural. As the dome 
of the sky, though correlated with the plane 
of the earth beneath, is not continuous, but 
inverted, needing a medium which shall unite 
both, so does the spiritual idea necessitate a 
natural fact, thus establishing a supernatural 
order o'f thought and life as mediatorial con- 
necting link. Religious rites and dogmas are 
the embodiment of a spiritual idea or fact in its 
corresponding material or natural form ; and 
such rite or dogma, to be universal and immortal, 



38 ESSAYS. 

must not and cannot be the product of any 
man's faith or fancy, wish or will. It must 
be the perception and expression of a real cor- 
respondence between the actual fact and the 
thing signified. To perceive this is the highest 
function of the imagination, and a direct gift 
from the Creative Power. Every religious rite 
and dogma is a symbol, or the balling, or orbing 
into one, of two opposite conceptions. 

I wish to emphasize that these symbols are 
not inventions, but inspirations through the rea- 
son and imagination. Neither Orpheus nor 
Moses could invent a symbol. They are born of 
no man's wit or fancy. They have their origin 
in the very constitution of the divine and 
human minds, and are themselves a living and 
persistent proof that the spiritual is not an ex- 
altation or idealization of the natural, but an 
opposite order of thought and life, a difference 
in the very life-principle. 

Man inevitably and instinctively tends to 
organization. Wherever there is a soul, there 
must be a body. A soul cannot and will never 
exist without a body. 

The man of genius is not only more intuitive 
and imaginative than the less gifted, but is of 
a more comprehensive understanding, that is, 
he has a bolder and surer sweep of intelligence 
in the adaptation of means to ends. Thus, 



JESSAY UPON RELIGION. 39 

throngli the agency of these men, the rites and 
dogmas of religion, which are the material 
forms of spiritual facts, become organized into 
a ritual, and the religious ritual of any people 
is the expression and embodiment of its highest 
thought and feeling. But humanity is one, 
though races are differenced one from the other, 
and man exists as individual men. It is this 
oneness of humanity, and the fact that rites and 
observances come from no man's fancy or ca- 
price, but are the record of the real symbolism 
of nature and the soul, inspirations of universal 
meaning, that account for the wonderful fact 
that they have no appreciable beginning in his- 
tory. In the earliest and undated records of 
the race are extant hymns of adoration and 
praise, the confession of sin, the offering of 
gifts, and the altars of sacrifice. 

Whatever might be the theology of the pe- 
riod, that is, the conception and statement con- 
cerning the nature and traits of the object of 
worship, the worship itself is always a ritual of 
sacrifice and reconciliation. 

And so loyal has been the imagination of 
men to the conservation of legitimate corre- 
spondences, the offspring of the imagination, 
not of the fancy, that Christendom did but take 
up and perpetuate the rites and symbols of the 
Jewish and Pagan churches, retaining the form, 



40 ESSAYS. 

but transmuting it by an ever-deepening signi- 
ficance. 

The observance and celebration of the win- 
ter solstice, the offerings at spring-tide, the bap- 
tism and communion-table, even the glorified 
Mother and Child, are found as symbol and 
commemoration in the oldest civilizations, and 
in religious organizations outside of and op- 
posed to Christianity . 

What, then, constitutes the difference be- 
tween the universal religion that these forms 
express and the Christianity we hold so dear ? 

I conceive that the difference in religions, and 
the superiority of Christianity over all others, 
consists in the theology that lies behind them. 

Religion is very external to theology, and 
takes its character and coloring from what is 
received as revelation of the nature and attri- 
butes of the object of worship. 

Religion is, as we have said, the natural im- 
pulse or movement outward of the soul in 
search of a somewhat upon which to pour out 
its love and praise. It has no objective value. 
It does not in itself tell aught reliable concern- 
ing this object of its search. It is merely the 
uplifted hands stretching upward to " that in- 
verted cup we call the sky, which so impo- 
tently rolls." The subtle pangs of contrition 
and the pleadings of prayer are as unisrersal 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 41 

and natural as the emotions of pity or the em- 
braces of aifection. A Brahmin or a Buddhist 
is as religious as a Christian. No religionist 
Can exceed in devoutness a devout Mahometan. 
Religion or religious exercises, more or less, are 
no test of truth. 

Theology is what people think about God. 
Religion is what they feel in their own souls. 
I believe it is of immense consequence what 
people think. I know it has been said by great 
authorities that it is no matter what one's creed 
is, provided the life is right. But I believe 
that the life will inevitably follow the thought. 
Perhaps not to-day nor to-morrow, but sooner 
or later, somewhere or other, we shall be con- 
formed to what we really believe. Persons 
differ greatly in this respect, from original 
temperament and characteristics. Many per- 
sons will be intellectually possessed of views 
radically false, but, from inherited conservative 
tendencies of taste or circumstances, will not 
be rapidly affected to ill. Others, with more 
of the Celtic element in their make-up, will rush 
upon the realizing of their thought, and if the 
thought is an inversion of the truth, or the crys- 
tallizing of a false tendency, the result will as- 
suredly be disease or dissolution of the moral 
status. The law of life abides. Sooner or 
later, " as one thinketh, so is he." The virile 



42 ESSAYS. 

element of thought asserts its mastery over 
feeling in that inner domain. I repeat, the 
superiority of a religion is in the theology that 
lies behind it. I consider the enmity and sepa- 
ration of the Hebrews from the surrounding 
nationalities to have its cause and reason Justin 
this, that the theology of the Hebrews, as far 
as their revelation went, was a true theology. 

The ancient Egyptians were thinkei's, and 
doers of their thought. That which brought 
them face to face and step to step in irreconcil- 
able hostility to the Hebrews was the differ- 
ence in the conception of the Divine Being. 

The Egyptians were a very religious people. 
The hierarchy was the highest order in the 
state. The days of the year were full of devout 
observances. 

Society was orderly. The details of life 
were rigidly adjusted ; the inventive faculties 
wonderfully alert ; the moral sentiments of 
veneration, justice, and benevolence as fairly 
developed and exercised as in contemporary 
States. But their theology was false. For 
that cause, efficiently and finally, their religion 
had no vital underlying element, and tended ir- 
resistibly to deterioration and decay. 

As thinkers, the Egyptians had surmounted 
mere nature-worship. They did not fall down 
in stupid adoration of mere outward phenom- 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 43 

ena. I doubt if any Aryan or Caucasian peo- 
ple, any historic race who have contributed 
their iota to the cultivation of human society, 
ever did. The ancient Egyptians had meta- 
physical notions of visible things. Isis was 
the personification of the universal, material, 
productive principle, throughout nature, — the 
great brooding, breeding mother, the mother of 
mysteries, whose veil modern science rends 
into gaps here and there, but has never lifted 
or thrown aside. And Isis is a great fact. 
The fatal error is, not in admitting her exist- 
ence, but in worshiping her as Deity. As- 
cending from the plane of material nature into 
the sphere of humanity, we find that this lower 
material element has its counterpart in the 
universal, teeming, affectional principle in hu- 
man nature from which issue all the soul's 
desires and longings for good, or that which 
shall meet and satisfy these yearnings. This 
affectional principle in human nature, to which 
the productive principle in material nature cor- 
responds as type and emblem, was deified by 
the Egyptians as the Creative Power, the object 
of adoration. But no abstraction or metaphys- 
ical conception can be made by any people 
an object of worshiping rites until fused, sym- 
bolized, and personified by the imagination into 
the forms and attributes of personal deities. 



44 EssATa. 

The metaphysical notion of the universal pro- 
ductiye principle is transformed into the god- 
dess Isis, who as Queen of Heaven takes the lead 
of her mate Osiris, though she is represented 
as bewailing his dishonored remains. The en- 
thronement of a goddess exalts in political and 
social life the feminine properties of thrift, in- 
genuity, orderliness, and excessive attention to 
detail, but, in the inner province of religious 
thought and observance, degenerates into the 
worship of all natural forms that represent pro- 
ductiveness and fecundity. Passing into still 
lower conceptions, but by a thoroughly logical 
sequence, the sensuous imagination of the com- 
mon people fell into the horrible vagaries of 
animal worship, and the cow and the cat came 
to represent divine attributes. 

The Persians, in their deification of a crea- 
tive, ethereal principle, Mithras, — symbolized 
in the sun and the concomitants of the sun, 
fire and light, — were obliged, for purposes of 
practical worship and for explanation of oppo- 
site moral and physical phenomena, to posit 
and personify opposite principles of light and 
darkness, good and evil. The Persians, in their 
theology, religion, and culture, expressed the op- 
posite but correlated thought to the Egyptians. 
But the revelation to the Hebrews was not of a 
metaphysical principle that could be symbolized, 



ESSAT UPON RELIGION. 45 

as water or fire, but the revelation of an abso- 
lute Being, a divine personality, — not a tribal 
God, more or less noble than his brother gods, 
but a Being incomprehensible and inconceivable 
to the unaided human intelligence. I under- 
stand the Hebrew people to have been so inter- 
nally organized that they were adapted to re- 
ceive a ritual of worship that embodied this en- 
tirely different and opposite order of ideas from 
that which made the substance of the surround- 
ing worships, particularly that of the Egyptians, 
from whom some scholars have affirmed their 
religion to be derived. The underlying thought 
of the two was diametrically opposed, — so 
opposed that it might well have called out re- 
sponsive thunders from the ever-listening hills. 
Without doubt they carried over into their tem- 
ple-service much of the pomp and parade of the 
Egyptian. This does not prove that the two re- 
ligions coincided. So has the Christian church in 
its Easter celebration borrowed from our Saxon 
ancestry the festival of the spring goddess Os- 
teria, with her floral offerings and symbolic 
eggs. The early Christian teachers, with fine 
religious instinct, retained the gorgeous pagan 
festival, and consecrated it to supernatural and 
Christian thought. 

I consider the great religious genius of the 
Hebrews, whom we call Moses, to have been in- 



46 ESSAYS. 

spired through the intuitions of the reason and 
imagination, those spiritual interiors of the soul 
which no man openeth and no man shutteth, 
with a conception of God fundamentally and 
equally opposed to the nature- worship and pan- 
theism of the East, — the personification of ab- 
stract supernatural principles as in Persia and 
Egypt, and the deification of human powers 
and attributes as in the Greek and Roman 
mythologies. The Jehovah of Moses is a con- 
ception of a Being entirely out of and opposite 
to man ; not a god, but the God, — a Being 
enthroned in the heavens, or a sphere of exist- 
ence utterly transcending the created human 
sphere. Not a Brahma, incorporating himself 
in the visible and invisible forms and processes 
of existence, a doctrine as abhorrent to the pure 
imagination as destructive to all genuine rev- 
erence ; not the weak, deluding, degrading in- 
carnations of nature and natural life embodied 
in the goddesses Diana, Astarte, and other 
female deities who trailed their slimy worship 
all along the Philistine coast, justifying even 
to the natural reason the extermination of the 
serai-civilizations that were dominated by them. 
The Jehovah of the Hebrews was not a pro- 
duct of their mental or moral status, not a con- 
ception of their understanding, nor a phantasm 
of their fancy, nor any outgrowth or outcome 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 47 

of their material surroundings. Kevealed as 
a spiritual conception to the highest genius of 
the Hebrew people, his appointed service 
consisted of a series of material images corre- 
sponding with and representing the Almighty's 
relation to man, a relation of absolute separa- 
tion and possible union. It is right to call 
the Hebrews a peculiar people, — that is, pecu- 
liarly fitted, in their mental and moral organi- 
zation, to the place they filled in the religious 
development and education of the world. They 
■were not pure, gentle, nor lovely. They lacked 
the subtle grace and interesting mobility of the 
Greeks, and the broad, comprehending intel- 
lect of the Romans. They were materialistic 
in thought. They thought in concrete images. 
They could not understand abstractions. The 
conservative structure of their brains protected 
them against the seductive influences of the 
feelings and fancy. The Jew, as an individual 
and a race, was fierce, dark, and cruel. The men 
could in assembled council condemn a fellow- 
man to be stoned for some slight violation of 
the national Sabbath ; and the women could, 
or certainly one woman did, confident of the 
after-echo of praise and laudation, allure and 
betray her country's enemy to death under the 
guise of a kind and tender hospitality. Such 
acts are abhorrent to our developed moral 



48 ESSAYS. 

sense and more refined affectional instincts. 
But these acts are temporary. They leave no 
permanent trace. They do not affect the uni- 
verse of thought, or the eternal interests of man. 

We owe infinitely more to the Hebrews than 
if they had been gentle and loving. The very 
materialistic constitution of their minds, their 
very stupidity if you will, has been a boon to 
us, inasmuch as it made them incapable of mix- 
ing their own fancies and conjectures with the 
revelation of the Supreme Being, — a being 
incomprehensible to man, and as inaccessible 
save in the way of his own showing. 

The God of the Hebrews was not a God to 
be handled by the understanding, nor caressed 
by the affections, but a spiritual Being to be 
worshiped in humility and awe. 

The sole peril, the one crime possible to the 
Hebrew, was idolatry. And such is the consti- 
tution of the human mind that the same peril 
and the immanence of the same crime beset it 
on every plane of life and culture. 

I consider the Christian religion to be He- 
braism on an internal and relatively spiritual 
plane. I consider that the human conscious- 
ness has undergone radical changes since the 
Hebrew era, — that with the incoming of spir- 
itual truth there was a corresponding change 
in the capacity of the human mind for internal, 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 49 

conscious experiences. With every new pre- 
sentation of truth the human soul unfolds a new 
capacity of reception. It is the inevitable law 
of growth, — the interplay of revelation and 
development. Even in external conditions and 
circumstances a close observer will note a cor- 
responding internal change as both cause and 
consequence. Least of all is any revelation 
of truth possible to the soul that does not find 
the corresponding affirmation within the soul. 
When God speaks, then indeed do the people 
say amen. As to every form of existence, so to 
every conception or idea there must be two 
sides, the perception and the phenomena ; two 
halves to every whole ; two vaults to every 
sphere ; two principles combined and coactive 
in every possibility of life and thought. 

With the incoming of spiritual truth into the 
universe of life, and its perception, is born the 
internal power to incarnate it in forms of men- 
tal and moral experience. Every thought and 
feeling, in order to be expressed, must come out 
of the vagueness of the universal into some 
special form. This form must be either an 
image taken from the material world, as, on the 
religious plane, the shedding of animal life rep- 
resents sacrifice ; or an inner experience or 
mental act, such as the crushing down an emo- 
tion or passion under the feet of a moral senti- 



50 ESS A TS. 

merit. Man becoming more self-conscious, the 
imagery of his thought is transferred from the 
outward to the inward world. Types and fig- 
ures are translated into thoughts and feelings. 

The attestation to and confirmation of truth 
comes from within. That which was prescribed 
ceremonial in the old worship is transformed 
into internal knowledge in the new. The child 
reads the nursery fable as story and adventure ; 
the older mind apprehends it as a picture of 
thought and life, and reads the same story in 
its own experience. In the great picture-book 
of the Hebrew ritual, that which was told to 
the eye, namely, the absolute separation of the 
divine and human, of the spiritual and natural, 
and the possibility and method of the transfu- 
sion of life from the one into the other, becomes 
part of the religious consciousness of the early 
Christians in a mysterious sense of sin wholly 
independent of outward act, and oftenest most 
intense in persons of immaculate life ; in a 
marvelous sense of separation from the divine, 
followed by as marvelous a sense of ineffable 
union. Just so much of the material symbol- 
ism was retained as served for suggesting and 
intensifying the more internal forms. 

These internal experiences were limited by 
the same law of correspondence, and were not 
and could not be spiritual, but only supernatural 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 51 

representations of the spiritual, revealing in an 
internal, human, natural way the same great 
facts of sacrifice and reconciliation as were pre- 
figured in the external religious rites. 

Christianity is as old as creation and as eter- 
nal. It is revelation to the reason, not the un- 
derstanding, and suggestion to the sentiments 
of the modes through which the Godhead lives 
and acts. 

But the Christian religion I conceive to date 
from the era when a new opening of the human 
consciousness answered to and affirmed the 
advent of spiritual truth into the world in a 
supernatural form. But I think we of the lib- 
eral ranks of thought need to remember that 
the Christian religion has a theology behind it. 
Its foundation-stone is essentially the Hebrew 
theology. Consequently the same peril besets 
it which in old time beset the Hebrew faith, 
namely, that of being drawn away into the 
vagaries of opinion. The idolatries of the old 
world are forever repeated in the speculations 
of modern thought. Old Egypt and Philistia 
reappear in more refined and intellectual forms 
in the metaphysical thinking of so-called Chris- 
tian sects. At the inauguration of the Chris- 
tian religion, human thinking and feeling bor- 
rowed for its symbols less from material nature, 
and found expression in more exclusively 



62 ESS A ¥8. 

human-natural forms and relationships. But 
it was no less founded upon objective truth, 
that is, the announcement of certain facts re- 
garding the eternal relations of the human and 
divine. These facts must be facts concerning 
the divine nature and its necessary relation 
to the human. It is therefore a theology. If 
Christianity were a religion merely it would be 
subjective, that is, a part and parcel of each 
one's consciousness and subject to all the vari- 
ations, delusions and illusions of that conscious- 
ness. But founded upon objective truth, upon 
facts of the eternal relations between the divine 
and human, it can only be revealed through a 
symbolism as universal as creation, and as in- 
timate as the profoundest phases of the human 
soul. 

It helps the thought upon metaphysical sub- 
jects to accept the fact that all creation in whole 
and in detail is symbolic. Every phenomenon, 
from the growth of a plant to the roll of the 
planets, takes place according to a certain mode 
or method, and this mode or method represents 
spiritual facts, and is the language in which 
they are written and must be read. Thus 
the only possible communication between the 
divine and human, the spiritual and natural 
spheres of life, is earlier by a series of imagery, 
and later by a series of mental experiences, in 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 53 

which the lower represents the higher and the 
higher interprets the lower. Humanity learns 
the things of God through the things that He 
has made. The fact of the revelation to the 
Hebrews being made in material images ac- 
counts for the persistency of the religion not- 
withstanding the otherwise unappreciative char- 
acter of the recipients. These images are the 
body of truth and do in their prescribed time 
hold the soul of truth in its place. Without 
this material safeguard, objective truth, prior to 
its incarnation in human consciousness, would 
have been dissipated in the contradictory asser- 
tions of the human mind. 

Every religion must have an organism, and 
the Christian Church is the organism of Chris- 
tian thought. Its dogmas and doctrines, more 
or less complex, its rites and observances, 
whether two or two hundred, are nothing unless 
they embody and represent everlasting spirit- 
ual facts. Christian doctrines are true just 
in proportion as they are intellectual state- 
ments, more or less confused, of these facts. 
A rite expresses the fact under a corresponding 
material form. A dogma is an authoritative 
assertion unaffected by the assent or dissent of 
the individual mind. A doctrine supposes an 
appeal more or less convincing to the judgment 
of the believer. The two latter hold higher 



64 ESS ATS. 

rank in religious education than a rite, and 
yet rites have a persistent value. Being the 
body of truth, they have the solidity and inert- 
ness of the body ; while doctrines, being more 
internal and intellectual, change and develop 
with the developing intellectual phases. The 
baptismal and sacramental rites persist, while 
the thought they represent wavers like a flame 
in the wind. The Christian Church, being 
formed in the likeness of man, as every organ- 
ization must be, man being the type of all or- 
ganism, is necessarily twofold. It has an in- 
ternal and external form, both equally essen- 
tial to its existence, as the soul and body of 
man constitute the man, and without the union 
of the two the spirit of man could not be mani- 
fested. This soul and body of the Christian 
Church, present from its beginning, have ob- 
tained the names of Catholic, or universal, and 
Protestant, protesting. The Catholic is uni- 
versal and persistent, and comparatively un- 
changing, as is the body. The Protestant is the 
protest which the soul always makes against 
the materializing tendencies of the body, yet 
without which it could not exist. I respect the 
Catholic church as I respect my body, as that 
which manifests, on the most external plane, my 
life and presence. Our bodies are as necessary 
to us as our souls, and the union of the two 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 55 

makes possible the shadowing forth of the 
spirit, Avhieh is the breath of God. 

Tlie value of this Church lies in the fact 
that it is body, a material organism, preserving 
and expressing the great fundamental facts 
that are the stuff out of which the Christian 
religion is woven. Believing as I do with Gui- 
zot, that Christianity never could have been 
preserved through the ages, never could have 
kept its hold upon the senses and affections 
of man, had it not been formulated in an organ- 
ized institution, I believe in the existence and 
perpetuity of the body, as essential and contin- 
ual. Men often deny the existence of a soul. 
They rarely deny the existence of a body. 
The spiritual ideas expressed through the two 
organizations, Catholic and Protestant, are the 
same sublime, universal verities, namely, the 
separation and oppositeness of the divine and 
human, the spiritual and natural, and the pos- 
sibility and method or mode of their union. 
Whatever sect or society may be founded, more 
or less avowedly, on other ideas than these may 
be intellectual, refined, charitable, but certainly 
is not Christian. I honor the veracity of the 
extreme Radicals, who, basing their thought 
and action upon the theory of spiritualizing all 
forms of life through education and culture, set 
aside the Christian name. High-minded, con- 



66 E8SAT8. 

scientious, noble in purpose they undoubtedly 
are, but simply are not Christian, and do right 
to reject the word. 

Neither that which we call historically the 
Christian Church, that is, the embodied con- 
sent or consensus of Chi'istendom, nor the edu- 
cation of the individual soul begin in freedom. 
The very sanity of the mental faculties requires 
that thought and action should begin in obedi- 
ence to authority. 

The consciousness of a child and of child- 
humanity is in a confused, inchoate state. It 
needs for its direction an external conscience, 
founded upon wider knowledge and keener per- 
ception. It must be trained in obedience to 
somewhat outside of its own unaided sense of 
right and wrong. 

Conscience is a more or less vague, a more 
or less controlling inner sense or sentiment of 
obligation, but has not within itself the knowl- 
edge of that to which its allegiance is due. 
Every desire or sentiment is born blind. Most 
of all does the sense of religious obligation 
need a guide, lest it stumble on dark moun- 
tains. 

The essence of all fanaticism is involved in 
following the lead of personal feeling or con- 
viction, undirected and unbalanced by any ex- 
ternal standard. Every legitimate form of re- 



£SSA¥ UPON RELIGION. 57 

ligion is based upon authority. Every church 
whose office is to educate humanity through all 
the phases of the soul's life must found its ini- 
tiatory teaching upon uncompromising author- 
ity. This great fact in early Christian disci- 
pline, represents to my mind the sublime des- 
tiny of humanity itself ; represents the final 
subjection of the perfected soul to absolute 
truth, — that ultimate act by which and through 
■which alone the finite creation can become a 
manifestation of the glory of the Infinite. 

I wish to dwell on the word represents. Rep- 
resentation of a thing is as far removed from 
its reality as the reflection of our face in a 
mirror is from the face itself. The reflection 
answers to the reality, line to line, angle to 
angle, but the one is shadow, the other sub- 
stance. So in the education of the soul in 
truth. We cannot study truth face to face. 
We are taught all through our earlier stages 
by representations, figures, symbols and types. 
No soul could receive spiritual truth at first 
hand. No man can see God and live. The 
Christian Church on its most external plane and 
in its most material form, represents, I repeat, 
the sublimest fact in the universe, that is, the 
absolute authority of truth over the soul of 
man. The other vital doctrine that this exter- 
nal church represents is the union of the di- 



58 ESSAYS. 

vine and human in one soul and one body, as 
typified in the most sacred and significant of 
its rites. These doctrines of passive obedience 
and of transubstantiatiou become interesting 
and sublime as soon as we look upon them 
as material representations of eternal verities. 
The majority of the persons who take these 
pictures literally are undeveloped natures, who 
feel but do not reason, who have not begun to 
think, but who in their cradles are not forgot- 
ten by the Divine Providence, which softens 
the very bread of spiritual life in the milk 
which nourishes. But humanity must grow up. 
It must become thoroughly independent of the 
divine. It must come out into the clear, inci- 
sive light of the understanding. It must put 
aside its picture-books. It must follow the fast 
inflooding intuitions of the moral sense ; must 
cease to be religious, strictly so called, and 
must become internal, moral and rational. 
There is no merit nor demerit in this. It is 
simply the inevitable law of growth and de- 
velopment which every soul, more or less con- 
sciously, here or elsewhere passes through. 

It is a remarkable fact that as we rise 
through successive stages of development, as 
individuals or as races, we come out more and 
more into the materializing region of the under- 
standing. We recede more and more from ob- 



ESSAT UPON RELIGION. 59 

jective, spiritual truth, and become immersed 
in forms of our own thinking. As we become 
more pronounced in our natural powers, more 
thoroughly human, become more real men and 
women, we lose our representative spiritual 
character. 

The illustration is complete, as drawn from 
actual childhood. The child, in its unconscious- 
ness, docility, and trust, has been the favorite 
example of supposed spiritual conditions. The 
mistake is in looking upon the child as already 
spiritual, whereas it has not yet come into the 
fullness of its natural development. The child's 
apparent spirituality is picture merely. As 
be develops into the consciousness of individ- 
uality and freedom, he inevitably loses his so- 
called spiritual characteristics, and becomes 
more or less self-assertive and aggressive. In 
the beginning he is ruled by precepts. As he 
feels his growing power to think, he questions 
the authority of the precept, and comes into 
self-government through allegiance to princi- 
ples. Precepts are obeyed. Principles are 
elected and adhered to. 

Just so with the human soul, child as it is 
of the eternal Providence. It is being educated 
through rites and doctrines which represent 
divine verities ; and also, and in due order, 
educated through the rejection of these sym- 



60 ESSAYS. 

bols ; for inevitably, at a certain point in his de- 
velopment, when the understanding takes the 
lead of the sentiments, and the consciousness 
is only a consciousness of natural affections and 
affinities, the man-soul rejects these representa- 
tions as effete superstitions, and through this 
rejection works his way out to freedom and 
individuality. I consider our Unitarianism as 
an example of this. Unitarians do not believe 
as masses. They are units of thinkers. They 
are clear-headed, clear-eyed, and pledged to 
the Highest. Born and bred a Unitarian, I 
esteem it as a broad and liberal culture. It 
is the extremest form of Protestantism, and 
Protestantism is the soul of Christianity. It 
demands the meaning of the ritual ; the reali- 
zation in consciousness and life of the doc- 
trine ; the assent of reason to the claim. It 
is coeval with Catholicism, because it is al- 
ways the religion of internal, originally-think- 
ing persons. Such persons instinctively assert 
the right of the individual to his own judg- 
ment of all his activities. 

It was the predominance of the sensations 
and of the emotions, which are only internal 
sensations, that prolonged the date of Catholi- 
cism to the sixteenth century. But we are all 
Catholic or Protestant, — perhaps one or the 
other at different periods of our life, — either 



ESSAY UPON RELIGION. 61 

believers in passive obedience to authority, or 
asserters of the rights and responsibilities of 
the individual. 

Christendom includes the utmost variety and 
shadings of these mental conditions, from the 
child-soul, typified in the legendary Christ- 
child, that lies swathed and cradled in its moth- 
er's arms, or toying in innocent wonder with 
the cross and the nails, to the full-grown man- 
soul, who in full consciousness of self-direction 
rejects as puerile and effete superstitions all 
objective revelation, holding no fact sacred but 
the fact of his own thinking. 

Christendom includes these extremes of be- 
lief and practice, and all the innumerable gra- 
dations between them that make up the diver- 
sity of sects. I look upon all these phases as 
tentative and educational — none as ultimate 
or rational expressions of truth. They are ne- 
cessary and invaluable as showing forth the 
inevitable phases in the soul's history. They 
are all steps by the way, and looked at from a 
universal point of view are seen in their ex- 
tremest arcs to be complemental sides of one 
perfect sphere. 



THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 

I BELIEVE humanity was created dual because 
there are two sides to the spiritual and natural 
order of thought and life, from the most internal 
to the most external mode of existence. Every 
form of life and thought, every phase of con- 
sciousness exists in pairs, is internal and exter- 
nal, intellectual and affectional, spiritual and 
natural, masculine and feminine. I consider 
this duality of the human consciousness to be 
symbolized in the primeval history of the old 
Hebrew Bible. 

Modern scholars assert that this primeval his- 
tory was not written by Moses, and not written 
at all, some assert, until the Hebrews came into 
contact with the Babylonians. I do not under- 
stand how this statement, whether true or false, 
should affect the value of the story. It is very 
credible that the great lawgiver of the Jews 
collected the traditions of the race and with his 
profound intuition of the spiritual, or rather of 
the natural forms that represent the spiritual, 
arranged them in the sublime simplicity that 
has come down to us. 



THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 63 

I consider the myth of Cain and Abel to 
represent opposite states of the human con- 
sciousness, which necessarily externalize them- 
selves in opposite orders of society and forms of 
human development. The opposite phases of 
human consciousness are relatively to each other 
internal and external, natural and supernatural. 
Recollect by the term supernatural is not meant 
the spiritual, but that which represents it to the 
imagination and sentiments. The natural and 
supernatural on a more external plane consti- 
tute the opposite departments of the reason and 
understanding, the sentiments and affections, 
which, through all natural phases of the mind, 
are relatively to each other internal and exter- 
nal, natural and supernatural. Acting upon 
the religious instinct, both Cain and Abel ap- 
proached the Divine Being in the act of wor- 
ship. Cain brought of the produce of his fields 
an offering of his works ; but upon this act, al- 
though possibly an act of praise and thankful- 
ness, no true religion could be founded, because 
the act did not embody a spiritual idea. A 
church, that is an organization for the preser- 
vation of spiritual ideas and sentiments, could 
not be founded upon a merely natural senti- 
ment, however genuine. An act may be an 
offering of joy and gratitude, a sort of har- 
vest-home, but containing no spiritual principle, 



64 ESSAYS. 

it can have no internal or permanent value. 
Abel's story, on the contrary, represents a more 
internal consciousness, an intuition of the idea 
of sacrifice, which is not a natural but a spir- 
itual idea, and an intuition of the religious rite 
or form which should best symbolize this idea, 
and this rite or symbol is the sacrifice of an in- 
ferior life. 

Upon this idea or conception of sacrifice sym- 
bolized in a corresponding act could be and was 
founded a church recorded in these earliest an- 
nals. This institution was not a product of civ- 
ilization nor a result of moral culture, but from 
the beginning a representation in outward acts 
of the true relationship between the opposite 
realities of infinite and finite, divine and human, 
spiritual and natural, intellectual and affectional. 
The offering of Abel constituted a church, the 
supernatural form of a spiritual idea, an eternal 
church representative of Christianity. But the 
nature of man is dual, and he must of necessity 
be developed upon the material and natural side 
also, and the two developments do not seem to 
have a continuous and reciprocal unfolding, but 
as the one advances the other recedes. 

Inevitably in the development of man, and in 
the records of history, the forms of material 
civilization and natural religion supersede the 
mental affinities and forms of life that repre- 



THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 65 

sent spiritual truth or the true relationship 
between the divine and human, and conse- 
quently spiritual ideas and their corresponding 
or symbolic forms die out. So in this won- 
derful narrative Cain, the representative of ma- 
terial, natural life and worship, kills Abel. He 
is killing him to-day. 

This story represents the inevitable develop- 
ment of society in successive eras from vrithin 
outwards, and as the more practical, material 
and natural life is developed, just so surely the 
perception and acceptation of supernatural forms 
suggestive of spiritual truth recede, are lost sight 
of for a longer or shorter time. Cain must kill 
Abel. 

Material civilization prevails. From the de- 
velopment of Cain cities arise and all the arts 
that explore and cultivate the earth, and this 
movement must not be killed. A mark is set 
upon it that it shall have its turn and time. 
It is the assertion of human nature ; the pre- 
dominance of the aggressive, the selfish, the 
material, the natural ; a descent from the more 
internal regions of the consciousness into the 
use of the powers and abilities that deal with 
material things and make them subserve the 
will. This is the law of development equally 
in the race and in the individual. Ever and 
ever in the successive periods of transition the 



66 ESSAYS. 

soul and society become more external, more 
sensuous, more keen in the processes of the un- 
derstanding ; richer in the products of the fancy 
as distinguished from the imagination ; mar- 
velously inventive in all arts that perfect in- 
dividual and social comfort and convenience; 
adepts in natural life and in all appliances that 
soften and decorate the bodily life. Ever and 
ever, by the same necessity and in the same ra- 
tio, the supernatural forms in the Church and 
State, forms that embody and represent spirit- 
ual ideas, decline and are rejected as supersti- 
tions, the product of barbaric ages, and opinions 
and rules concerning social and individual life, 
forms born of the reasoning powers and the 
fancy, usurp their place. I repeat that this 
ancient myth is the narrative statement of the 
origin, decline, and fall of the highest spiritual 
ideas; a process which inevitably takes place 
in the sure unfolding into individuality of the 
human soul, and is as surely expressed in the 
transitions of social life and thought. It is in- 
teresting to remember that this profound meta- 
physical fact is symbolized in high art by the 
picture of the dead Abel, which picture repre- 
sents the same fact as the dead Christ on a more 
external plane. 

After Cain, the type of the material order, has 
been developed, there must be another awaken- 



THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 67 

ing of the internal nature, another revelation 
thi'ough appropriate symbols of spiritual ideas, 
or man will become a mere creature of sense 
and time. The predominance of the material 
inevitably leads to moral dissolution, the end of 
which is the destruction of the soul itself. Thus 
the narrative goes on to say that Seth is born 
to take the place of the dead Abel. But that 
•which Seth represents will be killed out as Abel 
was killed unless it is organized in stated forms 
of belief and worship. To prevent this loss Enos 
is born from Seth, Enos, the earliest organiza- 
tion of religious and supernatural thought, the 
symbolization and embodiment of true religion 
in rites and forms, which are supernatural as 
representing spiritual ideas. The narrative says, 
" Then men began to call upon the name of the 
Lord." It was the establishment of the first 
church. The record goes on to say that this 
supernatural order again declines in the growth 
and development of the natural and material, 
and to such a degree that society, bereft of 
all supernatural and consequently conservative 
principles, becomes utterly disorganized and so 
far incapable of recovery that it has to be swept 
away, and State and Church reared from new 
foundations. We read that a great natural 
catastrophe drowned the nations, and Noah, the 
only man capable of receiving a spiritual idea. 



68 E8BA78. 

was forced to begin anew, like a second Adam, 
and save out of every created thing so much 
as was necessary for new production in every 
form of life. He sets up a new altar upon the 
renovated earth, and reinstates a religion based 
upon spiritual ideas. It is perfectly rational to 
believe that owing to the correspondence be- 
tween the natural and spiritual, so great an 
event as the dissolution of society, through the 
decline and death of religious and spiritual ideas, 
should be accompanied by great physical con- 
vulsions in the letting loose of the destructive 
forces in nature. 

I wish to emphasize this dualism by aflBrming 
that no consciousness is possible in the divine 
or human nature without the presence of two 
principles. Simple unity produces nothing, not 
even a thought. Consciousness means to know 
with. The infinite and finite, divine and human, 
spiritual and natural, intellectual and affectional, 
never run into each other, are never evolved, the 
one from the other, and can only be united by a 
third intervening principle — a mediator between 
the two. Every thought is made up of a sensa- 
tion and perception, and the union of the two 
constitutes reflection. When a child begins to 
think, he recognizes not only the object but him- 
self as separate from it, and says /, by which he 
emphasizes the percipient power. The union of 



THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 69 

himself and the object constitutes his thought. 
We cannot say anything without thinking its 
opposite. Language is full of descriptive terms, 
every one of which suggests its contrary. Depth, 
height — above, below — within, without — also, 
true and false — good and bad. There are two 
sides to the spiritual as well as the natural. 
The Church, as the organized worship of man, 
did not grow out of society, was not a result of 
more or less external culture or civilization. It 
cannot be too often repeated in this darkened 
age that the two ordei's of thought and life, the 
supernatural and natui'al, had their origin in 
different departments of human nature ; the one 
through the mind's affinity with spiritual truth 
and its apprehension of the form in and through 
which alone it is revealed, and the other in its 
affinity for and adaptation to natural and mate- 
rial forms of activity. Thus was man created 
a twofold being as man and woman, and called 
by the generic term Adam, a Hebrew word, 
meaning man, of which Eve is the feminine form. 
Man must get a material hold upon this earth. 
He cultivates the ground and brings his offering 
of fruit and grains to the Lord, as external reli- 
gion founded upon the sentiments of praise and 
gratitude, but not being grounded upon a spir- 
itual idea, it does not even represent Christi- 
anity. The latter, being the revelation to the 



70 ESSAYS. 

reason of the laws and methods of creation, is as 
old as deity. 

The offeiing of Abel is not one of simple 
thankfulness or joy in the good, or the products 
of human industry and skill. His offering is a 
sacrificed life, a mystery that can only be appre- 
hended by the religious sentiments and imagina- 
tion, and represented in symbolic images until 
it can be presented to the developed reason in 
statements of absolute truth. From the creation 
to this hour, Cain and Abel express two sides 
of human consciousness, two forms of religion, 
two opposite conceptions of the relation between 
the human and divine. 

This piece of primeval history, so wonderful 
in graphic power and profound significance, is 
a fragment of sublime metaphysics ; the first 
philosophic account of the founding, develop- 
ing, antagonism, decline and revival of these 
perpetual forms of human society, the Church 
and State, put into narrative form, — a great 
myth forever and forever true. Modern schol- 
ai's, with regard to races, recognize the Aryan 
or Indo-European (so called from its extreme 
boundaries from the Mountains of Caucasus to 
the Atlantic Ocean), which is said to have mi- 
grated in pre-historic times from northern India 
and spread over Europe ; the Semitic, which in- 
cludes the Arabs, the Assyrians, and Hebrews ; 



TEE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 71 

and the Touranian, which takes in the inhabi- 
tants of China and Mongolia. 

This classification is more or less changing, 
and Mr. Frothingham prefers the old classifica- 
tion of Blumenbach (born in Germany, 1752) 
into five races, the Caucasian, Malay, Mongo- 
lian, Indian, and Ethiopian. I think these 
classes can be easily reconciled by including 
the Aryan and Semitic in the Caucasian, where 
they undoubtedly belong, and letting the others 
fall into the Touranian if need be. 

The Semitic race includes the Hebrew, the 
Japhetic corresponds to the Aryans of modern 
nomenclature, and the Hamite takes in the Ca- 
naanites and other tribes which covered Palestine 
and the neighboring countries, including per- 
haps the Egyptians. 

The Hamite races tended to a coarse mate- 
rial civilization, destitute of the principle which 
represents Christianity, and were necessarily 
destroyed by the Hebrews as a pernicious and 
baneful civilization. 

The Japhetic races are those that have over- 
spread Europe and developed a full natural 
civilization, and been distinguished in natural 
science and art. Their religion, which is Chris- 
tianity, has been received through the Semitic 
race, because this race was especially that to 
whom, on account of its aflfinity for vital super- 



72 ESSAYS. 

naturalism, or the laws and modes of the God- 
head and its relation to humanity, it could be 
revealed in and through material symbols, or a 
grand, material, significant ritual of worship. 

Of the ancient nations, I will speak first of 
the Babylonians and Assyrians as being those 
out of which Abraham, the founder of the 
Hebrew nation, emigrated. 

Between the famous rivers Euphrates and 
Tigris, that rise in the mountains of Armenia 
and flow south into the Persian Gulf, in the 
plains of ancient Mesopotamia, now called 
Armenia, stood the cities of Babylon and Nin- 
eveh. Babylon is reputed the oldest, and as 
having been founded by Cush, the son of Ham. 
There was first what scholars call the Arabic 
dynasty, perhaps that from which Abraham 
went. This was superseded by what is called 
the Babylonish dynasty, to which, perhaps, the 
famous Semiramis belonged. Though we have 
reason to believe that these cities were in high 
civilization at least twenty -five hundred years 
before our era, the first really historic date is 
as late as that of 759 b. c, when the old Baby- 
lonian empire was divided, through a political 
revolution, into the separate kingdoms of Baby- 
lon, Media, and Assyria. 

The fact that particularly interests us is the 
character of the religion from whose dominating 



THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 73 

influence Abraham escaped. Some genealogists 
give the era of Abraham as 2300 B. c. Whether 
this date approximates the fact by a few hun- 
dred years more or less is of immeasurable in- 
significance compared to the fact of the eter- 
nal ideas with which the great Hebrew was 
inspired, and which ideas are the foundation of 
all that is vital in our religious thought to-day. 
To understand the principle of the false reli- 
gions, which from the beginning have strug- 
gled with the true for preeminence, we must 
study and analyze the elements and constitu- 
tion of human nature ; because false religions, 
if advanced beyond the mere worship of ma- 
terial nature, are always a deification in some 
form of an attribute or instinct of human nature; 
whereas true religions are a revelation of divine 
laws, apprehended by the sentiments of worship 
and obligation, and embodied in forms by the 
plastic power of the imagination. 

We find in human nature the presence of 
instincts, sentiments, and the understanding — 
the great intellectual power. The instincts are 
individual, such as the instinct of self-preser- 
vation or the instinct to appropriate food ; the 
domestic, as the instincts that found the family ; 
and the social, or the instincts which bring men 
into society or found the State. These taken 
together constitute the affectional nature, or 



74 ESSAYS. 

that part of our being which seeks its good or 
gratification in whatever way the special in- 
stinct demands. It is the great substratum of 
our nature from which issue the motives or 
movements that constitute human activity. 
Every instinct is utterly blind, and if left to 
itself tends to self-destruction ; therefore, along 
with every instinct, and as its accompaniment, 
appears an intellectual principle which controls 
and guides it. The perceptions and principles 
which control and direct the instincts taken 
together, we call the understanding or intellect. 
Thus we have in our nature fundamentally the 
affections and the understanding as opposite 
departments; the one affectional, the other in- 
tellectual, and the intellectual as the legitimate 
guide and controller of the affectional. 

The power of generalization man begins to 
use as soon as he is man. Every child general- 
izes as soon as it begins to talk. If this power 
of generalization were not primitive and in- 
herent, no child could ever learn a language. 
No mother-tongue is learned entirely by imita- 
tion. There are words which can never be 
taught. They are the products of the mind's 
own action — as but, for, and perhaps. The 
power of abstraction, that is, of rising from 
particulars to generals, is the mark of common 
sense. Not to have it is idiocy. To think is 



THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 75 

to generalize, and one thinks about and general- 
izes that of which one is most conscious. This 
consciousness, to all external people of every 
age and nationality, is the consciousness of the 
affections or desires. Tlie intellectual principle 
which accompanies every instinct is always 
there, but it is more internal, and the affec- 
tions are more clamorous, so that all false 
religions in every age of the world, and under 
every form of civilization, are a worship of the 
affectional principle as contrasted and opposed 
to the intellectual or rational principle. 

Every fact in humanity has its correspond- 
ence in material or external nature, and, there- 
fore, every principle in human nature can be 
symbolized or expressed by a material principle 
or the generalization of an activity in external 
nature. There are in the world of nature two 
forces always at work, namely, the creative and 
the productive forces. Every plant that grows 
from the earth upward, and is suckled and 
nourished by the productive powers in the earth 
in the forms of soil, heat and moisture, must be 
implanted as a seed, and the creative forces by 
which the plant lives are drawn from the air 
and sky, that is, the material sphere directly 
opposed to the ground in which its root is. 
Even in the material and most external world 
every existence draws its life from a sphere of 



76 ESS A ¥8. 

existence outside of and above itself. This law 
holds good throughout creation. 

The false worship of the old world was the 
deification of the productive forces of nature in 
the personifications of gods and goddesses. 

The creative forces of nature are primitively 
worshiped under the images of the sun, and 
that which represents the brightness, warmth, 
and majesty of the sun. The decline in these 
nature-worships is the falling into a more and 
more exclusive worship of the productive as dis- 
tinguished from the creative powers. These 
productive forces are represented in the form of 
goddesses, because these forces are in their func- 
tions and characteristics feminine. 

As false religions decline from the worship 
of the creative to the worship of the productive 
principle in nature, the rites and ceremonies by 
which the religion is symbolized and expressed 
simultaneously decline to a greater coarseness 
and sensuality. Every religion has its vital and 
destructive side, and every religion begins in its 
best and declines to its worst. 

All religious ideas and sentiments are ex- 
pressed through a corresponding ceremonial, and 
the tendency of false worships is to degenerate 
into coarseness and license. 

This same law of the decline in the principle 
of worship is shown on the internal plane, in 



THE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL. 77 

which good, as the spiritual essence of the pro- 
ductive power, takes precedence over truth, 
which is the internal form of the creative. 
These false religions are essentially the wor- 
ship of good over truth on the most external, 
material plane. When we see it in its greatest 
externality, patent to the senses, we are shocked 
at its grossness. This grossness of form is owing 
to the great externality of the age to which it 
belongs. But whenever and wherever the affec- 
tional principle is deified, and truth sacrificed 
to good, the degradation of religion takes place. 
The degradation means a more refined garb as 
the product of greater external refinement in 
thinking and acting, but this only hides the 
actual principle of the change. It adds really 
to its deceptive character. Satan, in the form 
of an angel of light, is no less Satan, however 
beautiful he looks. I would repeat that the 
worship of the productive forces of nature in 
the heathen goddesses Ashtaroth, Ceres, Diana, 
and others is the worship of the instinctive, the 
affectional, the natural, the good, unsubjected 
to the creative, the intellectual, the supernat- 
ural, the truth. These old civilizations, out of 
which Abraham was called, put the lower for 
the higher, and so does every form of thought 
in Christendom that puts good above truth, and 
so worships the manifestation for the reality. 



CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RE- 
LIGION. 

Dr. Hedge, after saying that Protestant 
Christianity has two foes, Romanism and science, 
limited himself to the conflict between religion 
and science, assuming at the outset that Chris- 
tianity and religion were one and the same. 

This fusion of Christianity and religion has 
come logically from the more and more stren- 
uous denial by the Unitarian community of any 
and all doctrines strictly theological. To give 
up all statement concerning the nature of the 
Divine Being and His supernatural relations to 
man is to retain only natural religion, which is 
the worship of an infinitely great and good 
being, the ruler of the universe. 

Christianity, properly so called, is not one with 
natural religion, whether considered separately 
or collectively. It assumes this as its basis, as 
belonging to or proceeding from the natural de- 
velopment of the religious sentiment in man, 
but is itself a revelation of a quite distinct and 
opposite order of truth. Natural religion, by 
which is meant the instinct of worship and the 



CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 79 

intuition of a being corresponding to this primal 
need of the soul, is the necessary basis of Chris- 
tianity. These sentiments and intuitions con- 
stitute man a religious being, and so make him 
capable of becoming a recipient of Christianity, 
as he must be first an individual man before he 
can come under the conditions of organized 
society. It is this fact, that he is a religious 
being receptive of the intuition of a God in his 
reason, and conscious of soul-experiences which 
demand a spiritual world as counterpart, as the 
impression upon our senses demands a correla- 
tive external world, which makes possible to him 
a revelation of spiritual truth, of which his 
religious experiences are natural forms and sug- 
gestions. 

The reverence for an infinite being, a per- 
fectly wise and beneficent ruler of the universe, 
and the correlated truths of the superiority 
of the moral life, and the continuance of life to 
the spirit after the death of the body, belong 
to the normal susceptibilities and gradual un- 
foldings of man's nature. In this natural de- 
velopment of thought and sentiment, the sure 
and unvarying process is from the internal to 
the external, " out of the everywhere into the 
here." 

In the earliest conditions of the soul and the 
race, the religious intuitions suggest prayer and 



80 ESSAYS. 

expiation and sacrifice, accompanied, as these 
intuitions invariably are, with a pervading sense 
of sin. As the moral consciousness rises to a 
higher individual plane, that is, as the mind 
becomes more perceptive of vs^hat is individual 
rather than of vrhat is universal, this sense of 
sin dies out, and is replaced by a sense of im- 
perfection, which in its turn passes off in the 
processes of moral culture, and is dissipated at 
last in the quiet of self-approval. 

With the obliteration of the sense of sin in 
the consciousness, the more secret intuitions of 
the methods of pardon and atonement are ban- 
ished into unreality. The words themselves 
begin to ring false, as conventional and tradi- 
tional. Surely where there is no separation, no 
at-one-ment is possible. With the expulsion of 
the sense of sin every other primitive doctrine 
must vanish. They stand or fall together. 

Unitarian Christianity is the transcript of the 
moral consciousness. It is a psychology. No 
revelation is needed, only the quickening of cer- 
tain intellectual faculties and the refining of the 
moral perceptions. Its form of thought is the 
result of moral culture. The individual and 
the race having risen to a higher plane of indi- 
vidual thought and consciousness, pass, as it 
were, into a well-ordered room, clean, still, and 
light. The soul is scarcely conscious of any 



CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 81 

antagonism within itself of a higher and lower 
impulse and principle, far less of any enmity to 
the divine love and wisdom. It looks within 
and finds noble aspirations and loving purposes, 
dashed now and then by a shadow of self-love, 
but on the whole far more in harmony with 
purity and right than the reverse. In consistent 
and sincere self-respect, it banishes as abhorrent 
to enlightened reason the spectres of sin, de- 
pravity, and an offended God that haunted the 
imaginations of the earlier world. Necessarily 
in this reading of the consciousness all the 
peculiar doctrines of the medieeval church con- 
cerning reconciliation and redemption are re- 
jected as outworn fables. There is no need of 
them. The more candid the soul the more 
decided its rejection. It does not find within 
itself any correlated need. But such a soul 
accepts in delight, grows, and takes com- 
fort in the unrestricted development of natural 
religion. It was a living faith to our fathers, 
and they christened it by the ancient name 
because the old name was still a spell to con- 
jure religious emotion and faith ; but the bolder 
thought and freer speech of this generation logi- 
cally rejects the christening and calls it Free 
Religion. 

I respect every free religionist who says he is 
not a Christian. I think Unitarianism, with its 



82 ESSA Y3. 

clinging to Christian names and rites, as Bap- 
tism and the Supper (which are very lovely in 
their way as consecration and memorial, but 
should not be named christening and commu- 
nion), tends more to delay the announcement of 
true Christianity than does Radicalism. Let 
Unitarianism call itself the highest form of 
natural religion. Let it have its rites of conse- 
cration and memorial, and gather around them 
all that is lovely and attractive to the eye 
and heart ; but let it be done as an offering to 
the Father, the beneficent ruler of men, and in 
respect for the brother and teacher, Jesus of 
Nazareth, — not observed in the name of the 
Christ, for the Christ in any other than a fanci- 
ful sense is not needed nor demanded if the soul 
is by nature in harmony with the divine order. 

It is true, as Dr. Hedge asserts, that there is 
no conflict possible between religion and science, 
because they are both developments of human 
thought and experience in different departments. 
But between all natural thought and inferences, 
whether religious or scientific, and the truths 
of Christianity, or the doctrine of a Christ as 
mediator between God and man, there is and 
must be an eternal conflict, because they repre- 
sent, not only different, but entirely distinct 
and opposite orders of thought. 

Men are wiser than they know. The Uni- 



CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 83 

tarian consciousness, no longer finding within 
itself any condition expi'essive of sin or sepai-a- 
tion, (for the words are i-adically the same,) ne- 
cessarily repudiates it as a doctrine, and with it 
the correlated doctrines of atonement and re- 
demption. It is true that these terms cover no 
fact of the natural relation between man and 
deity. When the mind conceives these spiritual 
ideas under natural forms of thought, it shows 
that that mind is dominated by the religious 
sentiments, and has not come into the light of 
the understanding, or has not allowed that light 
to fall upon its religious beliefs. It is in the 
primitive condition of the consciousness, in the 
race as in the individual, that the sense of 
separation is embodied in rites of expiation and 
sacrifice, or in dogmas which are the intellectual 
statements of the same. 

To this condition of the consciousness revela- 
tion is possible, because it possesses within itself 
natural forms of thought and feeling which in- 
carnate and .so make a reality to the mind of 
spiritual ideas. 

We repeat that the revelation of the Christ 
or divine humanity into which the soul must 
be redeemed through the sacrifice of its own 
principle of life, and by which alone it can be- 
come recipient of the divine inspirations, can 
be accepted by the consciousness when domi- 



84 ESS A Y8. 

nated by religious intuitions and sentiments ; 
but the Unitarian consciousness, being moral 
and consequently external, is not cognizant of 
these truths, and consistently rejects them as 
the products of a barbaric era. 

I consider Unitarianism to have done a noble 
work by developing and elevating the moral 
nature. It has freed the mind from formulas 
that had become narrow and material. It has 
brought out the human side of thought and life. 
It has emancipated man. It has won the battle 
for freedom. It has refined the natural life in 
its gentle and beneficent ministrations. Yet it is 
natural religion only. It does not need to be 
revealed in any special sense. It is the product 
of the gradual uplifting and unfolding of hu- 
manity as fitted for this primal plane of exist- 
ence. But it really does not open any vista for 
the ages beyond. Neither does it dare to face 
the terrible mysteries of existence, — the mys- 
teries of wrong, cruelty, destruction, and ven- 
geance that fill the world of nature and of 
humanity with cries of suffering. Advanced 
Unitarians themselves begin to feel that their 
central doctrines of the integrity of the human 
will, and the fatherly providence of the Most 
High, do not solve or explain the open tragedy 
of existence. 

A disobedient child of a loving father cannot 



CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 85 

be called a sinner. He is at most a fractious 
child, to be taken back to the embrace upon 
the first signs of sorrow. But the religious 
consciousness, in contradistinction to the moral 
consciousness, attests to something far more radi- 
cal than this. All religious confession attests 
in all ages a sense of separation and antagonism, 
recognizes the phenomenon of sin as entirely 
different from vice or crime. These latter are 
individual or social ; sin is generic. In natures 
where the understanding is highly developed, 
the moral sentiments supreme, and the internal 
conditions orderly and harmonious, these depths 
are shut over like earth-caverns once open to 
sight, but latterly closed in and covered with 
flowers. Such persons know only the outer- 
most crust or top-layer of their being. Now 
and then into this delicate crust enters the 
harsh ploughshare of some terrible sorrow or 
profound passion, and the soul finds itself amid 
the roots or ground-soil of its being, and be- 
comes convulsed with problems that find no 
solution nor consolation in the voices of nature 
within or without. The God of nature is piti- 
less, executing his laws with merciless exacti- 
tude, omnipotent indeed and all-wise, but sepa- 
rated by impassable barriers from this creature- 
man, this thwarted, deceived creature, betrayed 
by all the hopes and visions that floated in his 



86 ESSAYS. 

morning sky. This God is strong, impassible, 
self-centred. This creature is convicted of in- 
competence, weakness, defeat. The gulf be- 
tween the two is impassable. What can puny 
human efifort or will avail to bridge it? Man 
cannot go up to God. If God comes not down, 
the two can never meet. Where the meeting 
is, must the mediator be. Twice in the soul's 
history is this experience of sin and need, and 
the conditions of a revelation, made possible. 
First, when passing through the phases of a 
true religious experience, it receives divine 
truth through these, as the natural forms of 
spiritual ideas. And, secondly, when, having 
used all it can appropriate of the moral side of 
truth, it is awakened out of its smiling calm by 
some convulsion of thought or life, an illuminar 
tion from the highest reason flashes a light into 
its darkness, and Christian or spiritual truth is 
apprehended as the rationale of creation, the 
revealing of the law or method of the universe. 
Then is seen the meaning of the doctrine of the 
Christ, and why Christendom has clung so 
tenaciously to it. At once humanity is seen 
as one ; the soul as one ; character, history, 
destiny, deliverance, as one. No conception 
of union from without, no touching of bodily 
hands, no community of person or property, no 
ministrations of aid or sympathy, can approach 



CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 87 

this sense of unity in one life ; one in sin or 
separation, one in the hope of redemption. 
The consciousness of separation brings the rec- 
ognition of the revelation, and the announce- 
ment of revelation awakens the sense of sin. 
They are coordinate. The sense of need is the 
condition of perception. 

The forms of thought and life in religious 
experience, being natural, can only represent 
spiritual verities. Revelation is made through 
representation. The most universal form of 
religious experience is a sense of sin, not of 
this or that overt act, but a sense of separate- 
ness from ineffable purity ; and the earliest reli- 
gious rites are sacrificial and expiatory. 

These rites, like the dogmas that accompany 
them, are the symbolizing by the imagination 
of the conceptions evolved from the religious 
nature. As the plane of consciousness is ele- 
vated, all the phases of thought and feeling 
becoming more orderly, the formulas that the 
understanding makes of these internal facts are 
more moral and human, and being products of 
the understanding and fancy, instead of the 
religious sentiments and imagination, are less 
stimulating to the religious nature. Even Lu- 
ther complained of the decline of piety in his 
household. " How is it," he says to Katherine 
Von Bora, " that we prayed often and fer- 



88 ESSAYS. 

vently in the cloister, and now so seldom and 
coldly?" And Unitarians acknowledge with 
wonder and sadness the coldness of their re- 
ligious services. Dr. Gannett, the ardent and 
militant Unitarian, confesses that he is refreshed 
and set aglow by contact with Orthodox soci- 
eties. 

The doctrines of natural religion, evolyed 
from the development of the human conscious- 
ness, cannot reach the profoundest depths of 
the human soul. Deep only calleth unto deep. 
The eternity of the infinite must appeal to the 
eternity of the finite. Man may glorify him- 
self and find a certain satisfaction in the facts 
of moral development, but he truly responds 
only to that which is not himself. Out of 
his " deeps," indeed, man cries out, but the 
answering word must come from deeps not his 
nor of him. And the answer to his profound- 
est cry is always concerning the nature of deity. 
In great crises, man is not curious about the 
wonders of nature or the mode of its processes, 
or the means and method of doing external good 
to his fellows, but feels intuitively that a reve- 
lation of God's nature will solve all other prob- 
lems. 

Who and what art thou ? " Let me see thee," 
said Moses ; and the highest beatitude is not 
any assurance of personal wellbeing, but the 
promise of seeing God. 



CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 89 

This demand to see God, I consider to be the 
demand for a theology, and no luxury of moral 
or religious sentiments, no concert of moral 
harmonies in character or society, can supersede 
this deepest demand of humanity. If the 
thing were not too absurd, we could say, rather 
let all religion go and give us a theology ; for 
the former concerns our own Tightness and con- 
solation, but the latter supposes and demands 
a knowledge of Him who fills the heavens and 
the earths. Religion, it is said, is not only pos- 
sible, but actual. It is the yearning of the 
human soul toward ever nobler conditions ; but 
theology, it is contended, is neither possible nor 
actual. Certainly here comes in the necessity 
of a revelation : God himself must tell of him- 
self. Paul claims that he has done this, that he 
has shown the mystery of the Godhead in the 
things that he has made ; that all nature, includ- 
ing the soul of man as its head, represents iu 
its constitution the mode of the divine exist- 
ence, and that this constitution is triune. 

Two opposite spheres are made one by the 
subjection of the external to the internal, for 
use or manifestation. God the Christ is the 
manifestation and glory of God the Father, 
being made one with the Father through the 
sacrifice within himself of the principle of the 
finite life, and through the Father one with 



90 ESSAYS. 

the infinite, indefinite spirit, the Holy Ghost of 
God. If God is simple unity, then is no crea- 
tion possible. How can variety come from 
unity, say the old thinkers ; how can differen- 
tiation proceed from that in which there is no 
difference ? If God is simple unity, then there 
can be but one kind of life, — either the divine 
life and the degrading and trifling incarnations 
of Indian mythologies, or the life of nature 
and the development of all consciousness from 
one primal force, subject to infinitesimal modes 
of motion. This wipes out all boundary lines 
between God and man, and man and the brute, 
and certainly fails to solve the riddle of aspira- 
tion and struggle. If God is unity, then the 
innermost of every man is God, as the Tran- 
scendentalists claim, and there is no way of 
accounting for the constant fact of physical 
and moral evil, and the constant failure of the 
actual to substantiate the ideal. 

But if God is conceived as an absolute being, 
containing within his consciousness the union 
of infinite and finite principles, the one sub- 
jected to the other as manifestation, and both 
one with indefinite, infinite spirit, then we can 
conceive two opposite spheres of being and of 
life, the spiritual and the natural ; and the 
opposition of the two is seen as the source of 
all the contradictions of life, and their recon- 



CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 91 

ciliation through sacrifice the fruition of man's 
destiny. 

The Christianity of the day is not particu- 
larly assailed by science, as it has already suc- 
cumbed to the influx of nature in thought and 
life. What Christendom needs is to have the 
foundation truths of Christianity enunciated in 
formulas broad enough to substantiate the dif- 
ference of the spheres, and recast in doctrines 
that shall be to the advanced reason enuncia- 
tions of spiritual law, yet profound enough to 
baptize the soul with an ever new sense of un- 
fathomable mystery. 

What Christendom needs to oppose the en- 
croachments of natural religion is, not the as- 
sertion of the existence of a God, the sponta- 
neousness of prayer, or the continuance of life 
beyond the grave, because these are treasure- 
trove in its own domain, but rather the state- 
ment of a doctrine concerning the divine na- 
ture itself, a theology corresponding to rational 
conceptions ; the opposition of the natural man 
in the height of his glory and beauty to the 
plan and purposes of God ; the consequent neces- 
sity of redemption in the very principle of his 
nature, and the offer not only of natural immor- 
tality, but of eternal life, through the Christ, 
or divine humanity. The development of these 
sublime themes, and the grand solutions they 



92 ESSAYS. 

offer to the slights and havocs put upon the 
interests and happiness of the natural life, told 
with conviction and power, will, when the full- 
ness of time comes, and humanity is recovered 
from the drunkenness of itself, from " the wine 
that never grew in the belly of the grape," 
so convince and enravish the reason and heart 
that the progress and triumphs of natural 
thought shall recede to their lower, appropriate 
place. The miracles of Christianity, or the 
proofs of the laws of creation working in and 
through the redemption of man, shall surpass 
to the imagination the marvels discovered by 
science. 



UNITARIANISM. 

I "WOULD suggest that Unitarianism is not so 
much a doctrine or body of doctrines as a phase 
of development. Few of this name have the 
same form of thought concerning the occult 
subjects of God, man, and the relation between 
the two. But with these intellectual differences, 
there are definite mental and moral character- 
istics which classify minds as Unitarian. The 
most decisive of these marks are an activity of 
understanding which demands the adjustment 
of all ideas and sentiments to the world of 
action, and a habit of insisting upon worth of 
character as the result and test of religious 
attainment. 

For the freedom it secures to individual de- 
velopment, and for this persistent demand that 
thought shall be actualized in life, let all praise 
be given to this Alma Mater of our religious 
life. We may thank God that we have been 
born and bred Unitarians, since by this and 
through this we stand on our own feet and 
think with our own heads. We are surely 
strong enough to look about us and see if we 



94 £88 ATS. 

really have all that we need. We are clean 
from bigotry and tradition, so clean that we can 
afford to look back and ask what this bigotry 
and tradition mean ; and forward, too, and ask 
if we have enough spiritual food and light to 
front the ineffable and inevitable eternities. I 
wish, first of all, that we could bring ourselves 
to a more searching confession. I wish that 
we would not use words and phrases that do 
not belong to us, — that do not express any of 
our experience or aspiration. I wish that we 
could have a certain brave and loyal consistency 
between the substance of our beliefs and hopes, 
and the words of our prayers and hymns. 

We have thrown off the heavy doctrinism of 
the churches, but we keep more or less its 
phraseology. This, I think, is a great hindrance 
to the coming into mental and moral clearness. 
We are not a church ; we are a congregation of 
individuals. We are not a mass of believers ; 
we are units of thinkers. 

Our honest protest against irrational beliefs, 
and strenuous effort to transform belief into life, 
have developed us into more or less pronounced 
individuality. We are separated, not only from 
the past, but from each other. We think and 
live apart, and have no communion of life. 
Our very individuality forbids it. 

We have come too far out into the light and 



UNITARIANISM. 95 

clearness of personality to give the august name 
of unity of life to mere bodily proximity or 
social and affectional reunions. Let us cease 
altogether from the profanity of giving to simi- 
larity of thinking and feeling, or the meeting 
together for work or discussion, the sublime 
name of Christian union. I do not think we 
do this to any great degree. We stand upon 
our individuality. By suggestions from this we 
learn our own personal and present need, but 
get no hint to any universal and eternal de- 
mand. We know where we are and what we 
want, but when we come to teach, what have 
we to say ? This : I am bound to live my life, 
and you equally so to live yours. What you 
have learned and know is of worth to you. Is 
it of worth to me? What do you know that is 
equally mine as thine and thine as mine? I 
appreciate your excellence, but your meekness, 
disinterestedness, and benevolence may, or may 
not, be the result of your finer organization and 
temperament. That state of mind and heart, 
which in one is the spontaneous play of emotion 
and thought, may be wrought out by another 
through energies of will that at once concen- 
trate and consume life. What is the common 
meter ? Our very virtues separate us ; we talk 
of the good and bad, and become lost in the 
maze of subjective judgments. 



96 ESS ATS. 

We are separated and labelled as individuals. 
We are afifectional, moral, religious ; but are we 
Christian ? That is the vital question. I con- 
ceive that Christianity is the opposite of indi- 
vidualism. It is not moral or religious culture, 
not more or less perfectness of life. It is life 
indeed, but not a life which is mine or thine. 
The life that issues in the development of the 
individual in moral and religious wellbeing is 
the natural life, — is what makes man, man. 
Virtue, according to its etymology, is the nature 
or condition of manliood. The good man is the 
complete man. But goodness is not Christian- 
ity. Goodness separates and distinguishes. It 
is modest but not humble : humility belongs to 
a different order of experience. We call humil- 
ity a grace, and so distinguish it from a virtue. 
Language is full of terms representing these two 
orders of thought. 

Unitarianism, as a phase of culture, is full of 
virtues. It is honest, loving, and giving. It is 
at home in nature. It finds fellowship in the 
morning sweetness and the evening hush. It is 
not abashed before the purity of the woods and 
the bold innocence of the rivers. It is helpful, 
self-controlled, and brave. It is the true natural 
life ; the working out of individual activities to 
healthy and legitimate aims, and the issue into 
free, harmonious development. 



UNITARIANI8M. 97 

Natural life has the right to be. It comes 
first in the order of thought and time. But 
history is written all over with names that men 
do not make but find. One of these inefface- 
able words is Christianity. I think this term 
means just that life which is not the natural 
life of man. A man may be at the apex of 
human excellence and yet not be a Christian. 

Unitarians do right in clinging to and cherish- 
ing human excellence in all its forms. No other 
sect has so readily and heartily recognized it 
under whatever form of belief, or as result of 
whatever variety of culture. But we make it 
not only first, but final. It is introductory, 
and we make it ultimate. We know its worth. 
We know that out of this free putting forth of 
the natural has resulted the civilizations of the 
world, as well as its confusions. It is of neces- 
sity, and has the rights of necessity. Without 
it no other could be. It is the timing of the 
timeless, the form to the formless. But by 
making the development of the natural life the 
ultimate of creation and destiny, we overlook 
or deny the great instincts and intuitions of the 
race. We leave out of language (that wonder- 
ful retainer and revealer of mysteries) a whole 
vocabulary of terms. Or, if we accept and use 
them, we belittle and pervert them by forcing 
upon them dishonest definitions. Better reject 



98 E88AT8. 

them wholly and bravely than make them stand 
for what they do not mean. Disgusted with 
the formal and irrational repetition of them, we 
put upon them an interpretation of our own as 
irrational and far more deceptive. 

Now does the word Christianity cover any 
fact or idea deeper, or different in kind, from 
the highest and purest religions of the old civili- 
zations ? Does it excel in precept or example 
the pietism of the olden world or the pure and 
lofty moralism of Epictetus ? Surely not, if it 
is in the same line of direction. But I do not 
think that it is this ; that is, merely a later and 
fairer form of the golden results of civilization 
and culture. I think it is not moral precept, 
nor good and wise living, nor the recognition of 
the divine fatherhood and providence. It is a 
doctrine of the Christ. It is a doctrine, — that 
is, a truth to be taught. 

As Unitarians, we have in myriad instances 
scaled the heights of human virtue. No sec- 
tarian list is ampler with pure reputations. No 
saints' calendar may more bravely confront the 
questioning of the skeptic. 

But in looking upon virtuous attainment as 
the end and aim of man's destiny, we set up an 
idol in the place of God. Not content with 
adorning it with the beauty that belongs to it, 
we crown it with glory stolen from another 



UNITARIANISM. 99 

sphere of being and doing, and so do, in fact 
and word, deny the Christ. I think we must 
acknowledge this. If we believe that we have 
the whole truth, let us be bold in saying it. In 
this I respect the radical wing of our denomi- 
nation. It denies the Christ consistently and 
honestly — and so puts itself in harmony with 
the policy and science of the age which recog- 
nizes but one kind of life in the universe, one 
grand unity of creator and creation. 

Professor Everett finds in language the proof 
of certain processes of thought. Thus and thus 
do men speak, because according to this method 
and no other do they think. 

As forms of expression follow necessary laws, 
independent of human will or caprice, so do 
words represent and interpret conceptions and 
experiences native and universal to the soul. 

Language is strewn with wonderful words, 
like sacrifice, redemption, communion, faith. 
Because these grand terms have been used 
by lips that have never quivered with the 
fire of self-consciousness, and so have become 
degraded in our association, let us at least leave 
them alone, and not put upon them the narrow 
and destructive definitions of our own individ- 
ualism. 

Let us stand steadily for what we know 
and for what we do not know. Let us avoid 



100 ESS ATS. 

mistiness and confusion, and intermixing of 
that which is distinct, separate, and opposite. 

As Unitarians, our honest and logical words 
are development, progress, good-fellowship, ex- 
perience. If we keep these clear and sweet from 
alien admixture, we shall be more likely to use 
the others with insight and equity. Surely 
these terms are not convertible and will not 
be converted by the clear head and honest lip 
into the others. 

Sacrifice, redemption, communion, faith, be- 
long to an entirely different order of thought. 
They stand for quite opposite conceptions. The 
fact that they have been and still are used 
formally and irrationally does not affect their 
value as terms representing realities. 

I think that in the intuitions of the race, 
Christianity and its correlated terms of sacri- 
fice, redemption, and communion, reveal and 
represent the conception of a life which is 
not the issue of the varied human activities 
culminating in their completion and perfection. 
It expresses the opposite of individualism. 
And the intensest individualism is the neces- 
sary and legitimate outcome of moral and re- 
ligious culture. 

But on this indispensable natural basis a 
life is to be inducted which Christianity rep- 
resents and expresses as a divine descent pos- 



UNITARIANISM. 101 

sessinjr itself of the soul ; in the fullness of 
time superseding personal and individual aims 
by making the perfected soul a medium of 
its divine manifestations. 

It is the inspiration in humanity of a life 
which abolishes all pride, merit, and distinc- 
tion, revealing its own glory through man. 
The redemption into this divine life is, in 
this sphere of our consciousness, the object of 
faith and hope, not of fruition. This life is 
hidden in God, and by faith in it, and hope of 
it, we live the natural life out to its end, where- 
ever in space and time that end may be. 

Consequently upon the exclusive belief in 
the natural order of thought and experience, 
which is the belief of the most prominent 
thinkers of the present age, are our views con- 
cerning the treatment and education of child- 
hood. 

Believers in the divineness of natural good- 
ness, and looking upon children as morally in- 
nocent, we have exaggerated their innocence 
into sanctity, and have mistaken the charm of 
their immaturity for the beauty of holiness. 

Our loving-kindness to them is cruelty. In- 
stead of being instructed and subjected, child- 
hood is consulted as authorit}'-, and respected 
as example. It is so entirely trusted that it 
is left unguarded, — so revered that it Ian- 



102 ESS A YS. 

guishes unguided. For the same reason and 
under the same social surroundings, age is 
pushed aside as effete and useless. Youth de- 
spises it, because it has no future, — disre- 
gards its wisdom as obsolete — and in its 
broader and advancing generalizations, in- 
cludes, as Dr. Holmes says, its own father. 

For result we have childhood and youth, 
keen to perceive and eager to act, but neither 
self-distrustful, deferent, nor dependent. Age, 
dismantled of the glory and mystery of a new 
birth and nascent destiny, grasps backward at 
the fast receding merits of the natural order, 
as it finds itself without dignity or authority 
in a world where no longer is held sacred the 
crown of thorns, but of value only is the jubi- 
lant step and incisive will. 

Childhood is overestimated and age is under- 
valued. Thus the increase in society of child- 
ish characteristics, superficiality, unreason, and 
love of pleasure. 

Surely the one remedy for the confusions 
of society and disharmonies of homes is the 
reestablishment in our midst of Christianity ; 
the republication of the doctrine of the Christ. 
Not that this life is to be set aside or con- 
temned in any of the methods of its better- 
ment. But surely it has had its chance. It 
has pleaded its cause and gained it. 



UNITARIANISM. 103 

From the moment when humanity, pulsing 
with new thought, protested its maturity and 
rights in the face of its exacting and domineer- 
ing mother-Church, all thi'ough its long educa- 
tion in the various and varying sects, it has 
constantly advanced in freedom and assertion, 
until, under Unitarian culture, it stands exempt 
from all outside restraint and authority. Now 
it may be, the time has come for it to be con- 
victed of weakness and dependence. It should be 
shown that it is of subsidiary value, subservient 
and preparatory to a life that differs not only 
in degree but in kind; a life that may or may 
not be actualized for ages, because it does not 
depend upon time, but upon more or less com- 
pleteness of conditions. The faith in and hope 
of this life must be the element to control 
and subject all natural manifestation, and the 
recognition of which can alone keep the indi- 
vidual and society safe and pure through all the 
perilous but necessary and inevitable phases of 
development. 

Children, far from being spiritual, are only 
imperfectly natural. It is to the unfolding of 
this nature, which is the creature of God, that 
adults apply themselves through nurture and 
education. How much more effectively might 
this be done, if we could recognize the subsid- 
iary character of all education, moral and re- 



104 ESSAYS. 

ligious as well as intellectual ; that its value 
lies in the fact that the whole nature must 
be developed as condition and means ; that it 
is the maturing of the plant, all the fruit and 
foliage of which is but the varied expression of 
what lay inclosed in the native germ. But 
education (and what is all life in its minutest 
and largest experience but a series of lessons 
learned, and tasks set and done) does not in- 
duct into the spiritual. In the natural order, 
we ascend from the lower to the higher, ever 
and ever upward. Thus do we gain fullness 
and vigor. But the spiritual is a descent from 
heaven, which comes not as reward of merit 
or guerdon of endeavor, but offered in the 
fullness of time to whomsoever has learned that 
with Him is no respect of persons. In the 
faith and by the hope of that divine life which 
shall ultimately make the human soul a me- 
dium of itself, and by that alone, can we bear 
the disquietudes and disharmonies of the pres- 
ent, and the obsolete words of patience and 
resignation resume their pristine meaning and 
power. 

Is the Unitarian world ready to make these 
distinctions ? Has it not done sufficient justice 
to the natural ? Is it not drawing to the close 
of the defense of the life that now is? Do we 
not begin to feel our overestimate and exag- 



UNITARIANISM. 105 

geration of this life — and long for the recog- 
nition of that which can only be made perfect 
in the heavens — and before which and in which 
our petty individualism shall vanish ? Once and 
again must the old symbolism be revived, be- 
cause it covers truths as profound as the being 
of God ; truths, without the apprehension of 
which, humanity must wither as the cut flower 
or uprooted tree. 

Let us be true to our Unitarian birthright 
of honesty and veracity, and not use this sym- 
bolism, save as it represents ideas as ancient 
and universal as itself. 

Let us search our faith and see if not in its 
own deficiencies lies the reason why it cannot 
meet the great, dumb, unintellectual need, or 
interpret the advanced religious consciousness, 
and so does not save from the present tragedy 
or solve the spiritual problem. Surely the old 
symbolism, the forever old and forever new, be- 
cause founded in eternal correspondences, shall 
again speak to the imagination and heart of 
mysteries, unfathomable to the understanding, 
and temper the rush and gamesomeness of the 
natural life by the grand seriousness and sublime 
pathos of eternity. 



THE IDEAL CHURCH. 

The Ideal Church must recognize the right 
of the natural to its free expression and develop- 
ment. It must recognize not simple unity but 
union of twain in a higher third, that is, trinity. 
The trinity has been held as a dogma, resolvable 
either into unity or tri-deity. It has not been 
accepted as a philosophic formula. Godhead 
has been conceived either as one, simple, uni- 
form essence, a unity inseparable even in con- 
ception, from which nothing could proceed, or 
a union of distinct Godheads ; not as the one 
God in three descending spheres of life or per- 
sonality. The Ideal Church must be founded 
in the law of trinity. It must recognize the 
Godhead as a complex being, infolding within 
himself all the laws of the spiritual and material 
universe. It must recognize the divine human- 
ity, or the method of union between God and 
man, by humanity's reception of the principle 
of spiritual life, and becoming one with God by 
change of substance — the spiritual manifesting 
itself through natural forms. Humanity in its 
redemption must enter into one life^ individual- 



THE WEAL CHURCH. 107 

ities being only multiplied and varied expres- 
sions of this. One life, one faith, one baptism. 

The Ideal Churcli will cherish the natural 
life, holding in perspective its union with the 
spiritual. 

The spiritual and natural, the Catholic and 
Protestant churches shall have no outside union, 
no mere tolerance and compromise, but recon- 
ciliation in the spirit, the recognition of each 
other's rights, and the anticipation of the blend- 
ing and fusion of claims in and through love. 
In the Ideal Church the two factors must be 
kept distinct. The spiritual must not deride 
and tyrannize over the natural, forcing it into a 
premature and hated subjection ; nor must the 
natural assume to itself the prerogatives of the 
spiritual, setting itself up as the ultimate of the 
soul, or confounding and merging its position 
and qualities in that of the other. It must be 
self-contained, self-respecting, insisting upon its 
singlehood, a Diana upon the mountains, chaste, 
coy, content. The natural must not hasten to 
give itself away ; it must learn to wait. Noth- 
ing can exceed, to my imagination, the dignity 
of the natural when true to its law and biding 
its time. 

Life is development and movement. Radi- 
cally it is full of labials, the most fluid of 
articulate sounds. Death is stagnation. In all 



108 ESSAYS. 

languages the word is uttered in dentals, ex- 
pressing the passed, the outworn. 

Negation impoverishes. The union of the 
infinite and finite in their representatives, the 
spiritual and natural, is a feast, a marriage sup- 
per. It can only be expressed in language by a 
rhythm, a song. Heaven is a perpetual hymn 
of praise. 

The Ideal Church represents, as the Catholic 
does, something done and finished, an accom- 
plished fact, the reconciliation of the infinite 
and finite in creation, and the " Lamb slain 
from the foundation of the world " in redemp- 
tion. That i^ done, that is provided for. 

The work of humanity is simply to adore and 
to unfold. The relation between deity and hu- 
manity is infinitely varied, thence complexity of 
worship. Both the natural and spiritual forces 
act constantly upon man. He is man, that is, 
the middle term, the point of meeting. He is 
not pure spirit, infinite or finite. The finite 
principle in itself, unsubjected in creation, is 
the separate, that is the Satan. Satan is separa- 
tist, revolter, rebel. 

The Ideal Church must be both father and 
mother. Father in the presentation of ideas of 
the reason (laws of trinity in unity, laws of 
creation and redemption), and mother in the 
nurture of the natural to its free and full de- 



THE IDEAL CHURCH. 109 

velopment. But this nurture must be according 
to law, in obedience to the authority of the 
spiritual. It must be a nurture in and through 
admonition. 

The Ideal Church will mother humanity until 
it is grown up. Then the soul must choose its 
life itself. 

I would repeat that the Catholic Church is 
sublime in so far as it represents the Ideal 
Church, in the assertion of unity and univer- 
sality of doctrine, because truth is one, indi- 
visible, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever ; 
being the statement to the reason of the abso- 
lute fact of things, or the eternal relations of 
infinite and finite life. Truth is perfect from 
the beginning, full grown, inviolable, immutable, 
admitting no shadow of change, eternal as God 
himself. 

Again, the Catholic Church represents the 
Ideal Church as it recognizes the complexity of 
man's nature, a nature having a within and a 
without, all sights and sounds awaking corre- 
sponding receptivities, so that a ritual of wor- 
ship to be perfect must be as varied and grand, 
as infinite in form and suggestion as is nature 
itself, or as the chords possible to be touched in 
the soul of humanity which in its gamut is as 
high as heaven, as deep as hell. 

To the Ideal Church belong architecture, 



110 ESSAYS. 

sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. The 
Catholic Church has been right in claiming 
that art should use Christian symbolism. But 
the Ideal Church shall recognize nature also, 
but in its due place, nature in order not in dis- 
order, as human subject to divine ; the oxen and 
sheep shall be present, but they must kneel in 
the presence of the infant Christ. Nature must 
look upward not downward. 

The Ideal Church will recognize religion as 
a part, the crown, indeed, of man's natural de- 
velopment, but Christianity as the assertion of 
great rational or spiritual ideas. The central 
of these ideas is the divine humanity, or the 
doctrine of the reception of the divine life in 
humanity. The divine humanity is the method 
of union between God and man, the redemption 
of man's nature into the divine by the transub- 
stantiation of the principle of selfhood (through 
which alone it gets its development or hold 
upon individual existence) for the principle of 
divine love, which is the communication and 
transmission of life to universal not personal 
ends; the subjection of individual to community 
of life. 

Now the presence of these ideas (which are 
only the statement of the nature of God and 
man and their mutual relation) can never, when 
absolutely and broadly stated, hinder or repress 



THE IDEAL CHURCH. HI 

development, but only stimulate the nature to 
an orderly, not disorderly, unfolding. Human- 
ity tends to disorder, as we have said. It goes 
astray as soon as it is born. Being the junc- 
tion, not union of opposite forces, it continually 
oscillates, and, its life-principle being selfhood, 
it constantly tends to run off the balance even 
in its noblest manifestations. It is safe only 
when it is under authority. 

The soul begins with an inherited, traditional 
life. We call ourselves free, and yet we are 
hedged in by social and moral traditions that 
enter even into our physical being. These tra- 
ditions are the laws of the soul's life, and the 
child-soul gets nurture, expansion, and growth 
by and through them. Its individuality is re- 
strained and governed by the social and moral 
laws, which upon that plane stand for the uni- 
versal principle in the universe. Thus the 
gi'eater part of humanity is kept safe and sure. 
The rampant individuality is subdued and modi- 
fied by social and moral influences. Peril begins 
when the soul starts to go alone. Upon every 
plane, the highest as well as the lowest, there 
are excesses and vagaries. 

The Catholic Church represented spiritual 
authority when it branded all escape from its 
controlling idea as heresies, even when these 
escapes were the outcome of the religious ex- 
periences of a Guyon or Behmen. 



112 ESSA YS. 

The inner mystical life of the soul is full- 
est of all perils when the authority of cer- 
tain great spiritual ideas, the inspirations of 
the reason, are not recognized. In proportion 
to the force and originality of the soul is 
the peculiarity of its danger. These inter- 
nal experiences and convictions, when the soul 
sounds the depths of its individuality, unguided 
and unheld by light and limit outside of itself, 
issue out in ordinary cases in all the forms of 
egoism that belong to the Transcendental phase, 
or in rarer cases, in attributing to the person- 
ality divine qualities and an unconscious wor- 
ship of the Me in the place of the Christ. 

The Ideal Church allows and demands the 
development of humanity to its perfection, but 
under the control and authority of ideas which 
represent objective, eternal truth ; a develop- 
ment not for its own sake, but for the sake of 
the divine humanity which ever hovers over the 
natural as the ideal, or in the old formula, for 
Christ's sake. We thank thee, we pray to thee 
for Christ's sake. This is the essence of sub- 
liraest prayer, the grand refrain of all worship. 
The development of humanity for its own sake, 
its unfolding as the culmination of things, make 
it its own God, and is the only real idolatry. 

Religion, all religions recognize the father- 
hood and providence of God, the training of 



THE IDEAL CHURCH. 113 

the soul through sacrifice and worship and obe- 
dience to a better and more harmonious con- 
dition. Christianity does not do away with 
this necessity of religion. It recognizes God as 
creator, governor, and father. It insists upon 
worship and obedience as so many school- 
masters. It is the doctrine of glad tidings, 
inasmuch as it announces an end to the " end- 
less toil and endeavor," the weary reaching 
up and on to an unattained and unattainable 
ideal; to the disappointment and dismay that 
perfection recedes just in proportion as it is 
sought, so that the ascetic, utterly unworldly 
Edwards bewails his vileness, and St. Paul 
counts himself chief of sinners. 

This is a fact of religious experience. The 
more faithful and devoted the soul, the more 
its inward eye sharpens to every fly-speck of 
failure, till at last self is felt to be a Nessus 
shirt that clings the closer the greater the ef- 
fort to cast it off. It is the intensified religious 
consciousness that has the haunting sense of 
sin. This is philosophically so, because the more 
intense the consciousness, the more completely 
is developed the selfhood, the necessary core of 
our being, that which makes man, man, which 
antagonizes man to God and constitutes the 
soul a candidate for redemption. 

Childlike souls, who dwell in the outskirts 
of consciousness, feel their power and inno- 



114 ESSAYS. 

cence, and are right from their standpoint in 
insisting upon these. Their deeps are not 
broken. The way of the human is untrod. 
Humanity as yet is an unexplored and undis- 
covered region. These have but stepped upon 
its border land. 

The Ideal Church will not hasten this de- 
velopment. It will respect the fullness of 
times. It will wait for the midday hour. But 
in the presence of the spiritual, inexperience 
will not be aggressive and assertive. It will be 
reverent and humble, enjoying the goods that 
Providence gives, serving out its time in the 
modesty and reverence of ideal youth. But to 
the awakened and experienced consciousness, 
Christianity is the good tidings of emancipation 
from toil, from unsuccess, from despair. The 
distance between the infinite and finite has been 
bi'idfjed. God has descended and meets man 
halfway ; the divine humanity reconciles the 
two extremes; faith supplants works. This 
Christ is the accepted Son. All shortcomings 
vanish into the abyss of nothingness, forms and 
shadows that flee into the night. 

" Just one touch of his hand clears the distance." 

Christianity, the assertion of absolute, objec- 
tive truth, the Son of God transubstantiated 
into the life and love of the soul, living bread 
and living wine, is the tidings forever new, 
forever glad, and of great joy. 



LETTERS. 



Fancy and Imagination. 

September 20, 1887. 
My dear Feiends, — I am so surprised at 
the way you speak of the fancy, as if it were 
inferior or worthless in itself. Why, the fancy 
in its legitimate place and function, and under 
subjection to the internal law that should guide 
it, is as important and necessary as any mental 
function. It is to the fancy we owe our per- 
ception of the beautiful in nature and art, and 
certainly the richness of expression in language. 
Nearly all poets (not the highest) owe their 
place to the possession of a rich and culti- 
vated fancy. I consider Mr. Emerson to be 
predominantly a poet of the fancy rather than 
of the imagination. Milton, Dante, and Tasso 
are poets of the imagination, and Browning in 
a few of his greatest poems. I do not know 
any poem of Mr. Emerson's that I should call 
a poem of the imagination, though I was one of 
the very earliest and have been the most per- 



116 LETTERS. 

sistent in insisting upon the exquisite subtlety 
of his thought and marvelous perfection of ex- 
pression. The Bible is a work of the imagina- 
tion. So are the rites and ceremonies of the 
Christian Church. These rites and ceremonies 
are so purely products of the imagination that 
they are evidently pure inspirations. Gregory 
First, in the sixth century, did much to arrange 
and develop them, but the poems of baptism, 
communion, and supreme unction had come 
down through the ages, — God's inspirations to 
the human race as revelations of the spiritual 
verities. 

The fancy is the power that mediates be- 
tween the natural or human mind and heart 
and the external or material creation. We go 
to nature to find words to express our ideas, 
sentiments, emotions, and sensations, and these 
words are symbols of the internal things. 

Poets and poetic natures are largely gifted 
with the power to appropriate from nature 
some one or more of its phenomena to express 
the internal condition. 

Without fancy there would be no compari- 
sons, no similitudes, no metaphors ; indeed, no 
language whatever, excepting the emotional 
cries of the animal nature. But of course there 
is a true and false exercise of the fancy, as there 
is nothing existent in God's creation that has 



FANCY AND IMAGINATION. 117 

not two sides. Fancy must not run riot ; it 
must be subjected and kept in its rigbt place, 
•which is to furnish expression to the varying 
phases of the human constitution. When it 
undertakes to express revelations of spiritual 
truth, or phases of spiritual condition, it 
usurps a place that does not belong to it, and 
falsehood and absurdity are the result, as false 
religions and false philosophies show. When 
kept in its proper sphere, beauty and order are 
the result. When it breaks its bounds, disorder 
and lies are rampant. 

The imagination is the power that mediates 
between natural thought or facts and spiritual 
facts or eternal verities. It is the great me- 
dium of revelation from the infinite to the 
finite. All vital religious literature is the lan- 
guage of the imagination. This makes the pe- 
culiar sacredness of the Bible, and of all books 
that follow its imagery. It is the great mascu- 
line power in poetry, and comparatively very 
rare. No purely transcendental poet like Mr. 
Emerson can produce works of imagination, 
because he did not perceive through the reason 
or imagination the great law of life which is 
the opposition of the eternal principles at the 
base of existence and their union in creation. 

No mere poet can see this through the rea- 
son. If he did he would be a philosopher, and 



118 LETTERS. 

SO far cease to be a poet. The philosophic 
insight interferes with the poetic insight, and 
with all artistic expression other than its own. 
Compared to the philosopher, the poet, indeed 
all artists, whether the medium be language, 
music, or painting, ai'e external and unreliable. 
It is the philosophic mind, when it is possessed 
by the true law of life, that is internal and vital. 

Mr. Emerson was a man of genius, and said 
many things which he had not the rationality 
to develop. One of his sentences was the seed 
dropped into Mr. Frothingham's more internal 
nature that became expanded into " The Phi- 
losophy." Natures are more or less internally 
developed. There is an internal development 
which corresponds in every phase to the phys- 
ical development. It has nothing to do with 
more or less intellectual gifts. A child may 
die a hundred years old, and a man of a hun- 
dred years may die a child. There may be, I 
cannot say it too often, great intellectual and 
artistic gifts with great internal immaturity. 

I am also so surprised, my dear friend, that 
you should so reluct at the statement of the 
phantasmal, phenomenal character of human 
experience. Every religion in the world rec- 
ognizes this more or less distinctly. All genu- 
ine religious literature in prayers and hymns is 
full of moanings over the shows and illusions 



FANCY AND IMAGINATION. 119 

of life, and longings for realities. When the 
Unitarian mind began to emphasize the worth 
and value of the moral virtues in themselves, 
it was the decline of vital, representative 
religious thought and the advent of mere mor- 
alism. The Unitarians were right in enacting 
their necessary phase in the development of the 
human mind ; the religious world was also 
right in insisting that their opponents had elim- 
inated the need and fact of Christ from human 
history. We are born into a " sea of forms." 
Every true poet as well as philosopher recog- 
nizes this. Every Christian knows it from 
supernatural experience. 

To me it is inexpressibly sublime that the 
eternal verities which underlie the throne of 
God are so brought down to our daily experi- 
ence that in their image and representation we 
may taste, touch, and handle them. I experi- 
ence the phenomenal facts of good and evil, and 
learn thereby that there are not only two sides 
to natural thought and experience, but that 
this dualism stretches backward and upward into 
the home of eternal principles ; the reality, of 
which all our good and evil is the image and 
revelation. I know their pictures could not 
exist unless there was a reality to be pictured. 
I learn to follow the forms of good because 
they represent the vital side of the spiritual, 



120 LETTERS. 

and to avoid the forms of evil because they 
represent its destructive side. But we accumu- 
late no treasure of virtue and merit in so doing, 
for our virtues are apparent only, and the re- 
verse of what they seem, being rooted in self- 
love, out of which we are made, and forming 
no claim upon divine approval any more than 
the opposite forms. Indeed, these apparent 
virtues are more deceitful and dangerous if they 
are felt even for a moment to be a passport to 
divine love. 

The sphere in which we now exist is a mate- 
rial sphere, that is, it is the most external man- 
ifestation of spiritual forces. Do you read Mr. 
Emerson's Nature, yet deny this ? It is a world 
of appearances, as all religionists, speaking from 
the inspiration of the religious sentiment, so 
truly say. This cannot be new to any thought- 
ful reader of litanies and liturgies. It is only 
new when looked at rationally as a basis of 
philosophic thought. 

^{ritual Laws. 

OCTOBEB 24, 1887. 

I DO claim to have some perception of spirit- 
ual laws, which I conceive to be the true secret 
of the universe. The univei'se, to my concep- 
tion, is no bundle of fixed facts, however evolved 
or created, but a heaving, pulsating, outcom- 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 121 

ing and progressing life. It is a teeming, 
striving, producing life in every core and cranny 
of its activity, but this life is finite, feminine, 
receptive, productive ; is that out of which all 
mundane things are made. That which sub- 
jects, controls, and directs this teeming life is 
its opposite and master, relatively spiritual, 
descending upon the more external plane from 
an interior plane directly over and above it in 
the order of existence. So there are always at 
play two kinds and orders of life, and no phe- 
nomena are possible save by the union of the 
two through the sacrifice of the lower as mani- 
festation of the higher. This universal law of 
life is as absolutely necessary on the most ex- 
ternal plane in the production of the lowest fact, 
as in the manifestation of deity through the in- 
carnate Christ. A law is a fact or principle so 
universal that it of necessity includes all possible 
phenomena. I stumble at no miracles or non- 
miracles, for the whole universe is flux, and 
things are as they seem to us. I believe this 
law of life will come to be more perceived by 
rational minds, and felt by the religious con- 
sciousness, as that which underlies and gives 
significance to all religious rites and ceremonies, 
and is the dividing knife separating the true 
from the false. 

The law of dualism pervades all creation, and 



122 LETTERS. 

necessitates two sides to every conceivable form 
or fact in existence. The natural fact should 
always be subjected, veiled, and controlled by 
that which is relatively its spiritual partner ; so 
when Christian art introduced the veiled and 
clothed human figure, it was a far higher and 
more spiritual suggestion than the nude figure 
of the ancients. 

Some transcendental writers try to show that 
tlie worship of the emblem of natural life in 
the Asiatic religions was a sign of greater inno- 
cence and purity. On the contrary, it is a sign 
of ignorance ; the absence of any true re vela-" 
tion which would show that the principle of 
natural life is not divine nor a legitimate sub- 
ject of worship, — that such worship leads to 
corruption, imbecility, and death, as is so clearly 
seen in all false religions. The spiritual, and 
that which represents the spiritual, is alone the 
object of worship. The natural, however beau- 
tiful or enchanting, is to be held in check by 
spiritual ideas, or it soon becomes rampant and 
disgusting. 

The Transcendentalism of forty years ago was 
the same movement, modified by the difference 
of the centuries, which the Renaissance was in 
the fifteenth century. It was the protest of a 
cramped, oppressed, and slandered natural order 
of thought, feeling, and activity against the ex- 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 123 

ternalism of the Christian Church, its unmean- 
ing formalism on the one hand, or its doctrinal 
statements that had become such dead formulas 
as to be rather statements of falsehood than 
truth. Every phase of Unitarianism and its 
higher Transcendental forms was a legitimate 
and purifying process. It was only when it 
began to usurp the place of that which, poor as 
it was, did in some dim way represent the spir- 
itual and supernatural order, and assert itself 
to be spiritual, that its destructive character re- 
vealed itself. So the Renaissance was a protest 
of an utterly overlaid human nature, a demand 
for freedom, rationality, and opportunities of 
development : for the natural life, with its 
hopes, desires, and longings, has as much right 
to be, as have spiritual longings — only it must 
not seek to be the master, and call itself by 
names of supremacy and authority which do 
not belong to it. First that which is natural, 
afterward that which is spiritual. Both are 
right in their place, but they must not be con- 
founded. 

All false statements in the universe come 
from the confounding of planes. We must 
learn more and more to divide and discrimi- 
nate, and call things by their right names. 

Greek art did justice to the beauty and per- 
fectness in its way of the human body. Its 
ideal was idealized humanity. 



124 LETTERS. 

The gods were no raoi'e spiritual than their 
worshipers — only handsomer, more powerful, 
more irresistible. To be like the gods was to 
be more free from restraint and control in all 
directions — bigger and mightier men. 

When Christianity came, it created nothing 
that had not existed from the beginning. It 
merely brought down to the plane of the senses 
the great fact of two opposite orders of life and 
thought, and the necessity of the subjection of 
the lower to the higher as the law of the true 
development of humanity. The ideal of Chris- 
tianity was not the flaunting of the natural as 
if it were divine, but its subjection and orderly 
obedience to ideas and purposes that represented 
another and quite different ideal of truth. In 
' Fra. Lippo Lippi,' the boy was right and the 
monks were right. They were both holding on 
to their side of the truth. 

I consider that the pure and helpful side of 
Transcendentalism culminated in Mr. Emerson, 
and that its expression now is the expression 
of spiritual falsehood, whether it appear in 
churches, in art, in literature, or whatever. 

All the joys of childhood and youth, all in- 
nocent song and jollity, love, friendship, and 
poetry, study of literature, art and science, are 
beautiful and legitimate in their place and time ; 
but they do not exhaust or even suggest the 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 125 

whole possibility of man's nature, because it is 
not the way man was made. He was made to 
represent two sides ; therefore he is never in 
this imperfect and undeveloped sphere in bal- 
ance. Balance belongs to the spiritual order 
only. Man is always, like children playing on 
a tilting-board, one side up and one side down. 
This first, initial world is a world of sugges- 
tions only. We come to nothing here. 

We are being trained to right perceptions. 
We live among spelling and picture, and picture 
books. The wisest and best of men and women 
are like children studying their early lessons, — 
some more or less advanced, and some text- 
books better than others. 

The religions of the world are the great edu- 
cators of the race ; but religions are either true 
or false according as their central idea corre- 
sponds with and represents spiritual truth or 
falsehood. The Christian religion, with all the 
crudeness, narrowness, and stupidity of its ad- 
herents, is nevertheless true, because it repre- 
sents under supernatural forms the great spirit- 
ual idea of the sacrifice of the principle of the 
natural for the purpose of becoming a manifes- 
tation of the divine ; the union through sacrifice 
of the lower to the higher ; the eternal marriage 
of the infinite and finite. 

A young friend comes in and gives me a 



126 LETTERS. 

picture of beautiful conditions and interesting 
natural life, of which a certain family among 
her intimates stand as type. The father, a man 
of distinguished intellectuality and great dignity 
of character ; the mother, a fair, charming em- 
bodiment of all womanly capabilities and devo- 
tion to domestic duties ; the home, a temple of 
art, not gaudy with fashion or display, but ex- 
pressive in every recess of the most refined 
perceptions of the fit and beautiful ; the chil- 
dren, models of all normal perfectness of mind 
and body, with the physical and moral sweet- 
ness that result from the conditions of health 
and happiness. The ideal and aim of life in 
this favored home is to live day by day to the 
purest aspirations, and to educate and train 
these children in the way of goodness and use- 
fulness. Then is the question asked, Is not 
such life desirable? Is it not beautiful and 
consonant to the designs of the divine Provi- 
dence ? Most assuredly so. Life is the highest 
art, is, or should be, the expression of the ideal 
in appropriate forms, and if man were made or 
constituted in a single, homogeneous form or 
substance (the very statement is absurd) it 
might be possible to conceive of the persistency 
of such like forms of human good. But the 
inexorable law of change and death is upon all 
these forms, however apparently worthy to en- 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 127 

dure. Children develop, individualize, and part 
off from the parental influence. The parents 
grow old or die, and in dying are cut off from 
the material conditions which make so much of 
their joy. 

Death is a separation. I do not believe in 
the projection of material conditions into the 
ethereal or supermundane world. I fully be- 
lieve that the series and phenomena of ethereal 
development will correspond to the representa- 
tion of it here in material forms ; but the at- 
mosphere being ethereal, not material, will 
necessitate a cessation of material relationships 
which make up so much of our life on this initial 
side ; so that death, I believe, will always be a 
separation. We have hidden its austerities 
under the flowers of a transcendental philos- 
ophy, but the instinct of mankind will always 
prompt the standing beside the dead in awed 
silence or passionate weeping. Facts are facts. 
We cannot alter or annihilate any fact by dis- 
guising it under some spurious or fanciful name. 
The mother feels in the depth of her heart that 
with whatever of faith and prayer she may give 
her child over to the divine care, the enchant- 
ment of the material, the witchery of the mortal 
roses and lilies, has passed from her lips and 
arms forever. Death, under all pagan forms 
of civilization, was the most terrible of facts. 



128 LETTERS. 

because it meant just this, the shutting out 
from beautiful material conditions. When 
Christianity descended among men in a form 
comprehensible to the heart and imagination, 
it came as the Consolator. It did not promise 
to restore the past, but opened vistas of glory 
and satisfaction out of the depth of the divine 
riches. 

Atheism and Pantheism. 

Atheism and Pantheism are both words from 
the Greek. Atheism is from theos, God, and 
a particle denoting negation. It denies the ex- 
istence of any intelligent will or power in crea- 
tion. It asserts that the universe is a develop- 
ment or evolution of material forces, working 
according to certain methods, without any pur- 
pose or final cause. It denies the possibility or 
actuality of any presiding, intelligent Creator. 
The pantheist, from two Greek words meaning 
God and the All, — Theos and Pan^ — asserts 
that the universe itself, in whole and in parts, 
is a manifestation and modification of the crea- 
tive power, that which has no existence as a 
personal being, but only exists through the life 
of man and nature. 

There are various forms and modifications 
of atheism and pantheism, according to the 
mental and moral status of the individual hold- 
ing these views; but the simple definition is 



ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM. 129 

always correct, that atheism denies any God 
whatever, and pantheism sinks his existence 
and personality in the All of nature, conceiv- 
ing with Fichte that He comes to his highest 
consciousness in man. 

I have been through a great deal of meta- 
physical thought and read largely in that direc- 
tion, and both these views of creation are as 
abhorrent to my reason as they are to my high- 
est sentiments and aspirations. I believe in a 
revealed God, revealed through the teachings 
of the highest religious geniuses of the race, 
and revealed to the reason and conscience of 
the highest developed souls. I believe in an 
absolute being, infinite in wisdom, who is not 
part nor parcel of the universe nor of the con- 
sciousness of man, but who constantly creates 
and governs the world, and is educating the 
human race for higher intelligence and infi- 
nitely higher and more varied work in spheres 
superior to this we call earth, where we do 
but get our initiatory footing into life. We 
are bound to make the most of this material 
sphere we call earth, knowing we shall pass 
as individuals into higher opportunities of in- 
telligence and action. Let no one shake you 
in this pure and enlightened faith. I say en- 
lightened, and I know what I say. You will 
learn after the profoundest study that the 



130 LETTERS. 

most enlightened reason is in accord with the 
humblest worshiper in a Christian church in 
the belief in an infinite being who creates 
and rules the world. 

Early Christian Art and the Renaissance. 

The period of time called the Middle Ages, 
which I suppose may be counted from the ninth 
to the fifteenth centuries A. D., is almost uni- 
versally spoken of by modern writers with 
contempt. I neither understand nor sympa- 
thize with this feeling. 

This period of seven or eight hundred years 
seems to me especially rich in the incubation 
of religious sentiments and dogmas that repre- 
sent spiritual ideas ; and Christian art, as dis- 
tinguished from the art of the Renaissance, 
leads me into deep secrets of the soul's experi- 
ence that can find no expression in the greater 
pictorial beauty of the Roman school. 

In the earliest Christian centuries, the di- 
vine man, upon faith in whom was founded 
the church of St. Peter's at Rome, was rep- 
resented in rude drawing, in crypt and cata- 
comb as the good shepherd, mild and loving, 
gathering his followers into the sheepfold 
of the church, and carrying the lambs in his 
bosom. By the fifth or sixth centuries, the 
widespread misery and confusion of society, 



EARLY CHRISTIAN ART. 131 

and the development in the human con- 
sciousness (stimulated into deeper life by suf- 
fering) of a sense of sin or separation from 
the divine love, caused the figure of the gentle 
Christ to recede into the distance, and the good 
shepherd became transformed in the imagina- 
tion of men into an austere judge, and we 
begin to find pictures of wrath and retribution. 
It is a phase of the human consciousness. 

But the human heart torn with anguish can- 
not bear this. It must have for consolation 
and hope the human side of deity as a medi- 
ator between it and the eternal, incomprehen- 
sible Father. 

Thence, as the true idea of the Christ was 
lost in the picture of an Avenger, there grew 
up by an irresistible necessity the worship 
of the Virgin Mother. This worship was al- 
ways considered by stronger minds, particu- 
lai'ly by St. Bernard in the eleventh century, 
as a heresy in the church. It was so, but to 
my mind it was one of those necessary and 
beneficent heresies that supply the place for 
the time of an absent truth. The conception 
of the Christ had become falsified in the minds 
of men. He was no longer the redeemer into 
purity and peace, the mediator between the 
majesty of the infinite and the childishness of 
humanity, but a wrathful judge of human weak- 



132 LETTERS. 

ness. Men had lost sight of the human side 
of the deity, and they must have it under some 
form or dogma to save the race from despair. 
This I consider to be the rationale or logical 
reason of the heresy of the Virgin in the Cath- 
olic church, and her early appearance in Chris- 
tian art. 

All the way through, she represents phases 
of the religious consciousness of the soul. Very 
early the Virgin appears, evidently as the soul 
itselfy with the Christ-child on her knees, pre- 
senting him to the church or united Christen- 
dom. The Christ appears at this time always 
as an infant, because the Christian conscious- 
ness always begins in an infantile, tender, weak 
state, and needs the nurture of the Christ-beam 
(Christopher), who always stands for the Chris- 
tian church or its guardian saint. Then, again, 
we see the Mary on her knees before the infant 
Christ, who represents the eternal spiritual 
truth which the soul must worship as " Sent 
of God." I have also seen pictures which 
showed the Christ on the heart of Mary, which 
surely represents the Christ or spiritual truth 
as having become the internal life of the soul. 

These old artists never represent the Virgin 
as a beautiful young mother with a lovely child 
in her arms. This came later, and was merely 
the deification of natural maternity, and, how- 



EARLY CHRISTIAN ART. 133 

ever lovely to look at, has no spiritual signifi- 
cance whatever. 

These Christian Madonnas are mature, mostly 
care-worn and care-burdened, as the soul must 
be before spiritual truth is incarnated in its 
depths by the power of the divine spirit. 
This is one of the mysterious phases of the 
soul's life that the Middle Ages has be- 
queathed to us in sensible images. Then, 
again, from the tenth to the fifteenth century 
we have the struggle for supremacy in author- 
ity of the church and state as representing 
the temporal and spiritual powers, most promi- 
nently carried on by Hildebrand (Gregory the 
Seventh) and Henry Second, Emperor of Ger- 
many. Gregory the Seventh, who was, as I 
think, a very great man, withstood the assump- 
tion of the emperor, and from his time, for two 
or three centuries, the spiritual power organized 
in the papacy was very despotic in Europe 
until it was shaken to its foundations in the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the as- 
sertions of individual and national freedom, 
which is the other side in the twofold devel- 
opment of the human race. The balance is 
never even. The fight is never over. All 
history is a record of the ups and downs of 
the two principles. 

When authority becomes oppressive, it must 



134 LETTERS. 

be warred upon until the human being gets 
a full and free place for individual activity. 
When freedom of thought and action runs 
into license, and the soul is on the verge of 
destruction from the absence of any conserva- 
tive element, then must authority be reinstated 
in church and state, to represent to the senses 
that freedom alone is ruin, and that there is 
always a truth and right to which the soul is 
bound in unconditional allegiance over and 
above its own inclination and attractions. 

Leonardo da Vinci. 

Leonardo da Vinci belonged to the age of 
the Renaissance. He is considered a Christian 
artist because he painted subjects furnished by 
the church or the legendary lore of Christen- 
dom. But he was immensely affected by the 
opening out of the early Greek mythologies and 
the early Greek art that burst upon the world 
in the fifteenth century, through the fall of 
Constantinople into the hands of the Turks, the 
dispersion of Greek scholars over Europe, and 
the founding of schools of Greek literature and 
art in the Italian cities, principally Florence, 
under the Medicean princes. Christian art be- 
gan almost immediately to lose its purely sym- 
bolic character as the suggestion of the spirit- 
ual through natural forms, in which the form 



LEONARDO DA VINCI. 135 

was utterly subjected to the idea. The beauty 
of form in itself came to be asserted, — the 
right of the natural to be, of and for itself. 
It was the protest of nature. The spiritual 
and natural are not at one or in harmony in 
this initial stage of existence. They are op- 
posite elements in our life, and when one gets 
too much the upper hand, it has to be limited 
by the protest and assertion of the other, be- 
cause both are necessary to our unfolding. 
The spiritual perception and the natural form 
are equally necessary ; both have their rights. 

The time when the representation of devo- 
tion, adoration, self-sacrifice, in lines that ex- 
pressed no human beauty, and did not look 
like anything human, had done its work, the 
right to represent the beauty of the natural, in 
forms such as the old Greeks saw and copied, 
asserted itself and made the school of the Re- 
naissance. Da Vinci's Last Supper was a re- 
markable instance of this. Hitherto the Last 
Supper had been represented as a purely super- 
natural symbol. The heads had no human in- 
dividuality. They were all alike, with a halo 
around each. They were simply souls. Da 
Vinci draws human beings around the table, 
faces full of the human emotions of hope, fear, 
love, expectation, curiosity. We get the hu- 
man side of things. We feel a certain actuality 



136 LETTERS. 

in it. It comes home to the human heart, but 
its distinctively supernatural character is lost. 

It is precisely the same thing, under different 
form, which took place in the world of religious 
thought and belief when the Unitarians parted 
off from the Trinitarians in the church. The 
Unitarian movement was a protest of the hu- 
man heart against the doctrine of total de- 
pravity, which was the favorite doctrine of 
puritanic Calvinism. Unitarianism asserted the 
rights of human nature, as artists of the Re- 
naissance asserted the rights of the human form ; 
but in so doing, both went to extremes and 
lost sight of certain supernatural significance 
in the old method. All periods of coming back 
to nature, whether in art or religion, are very 
like to be accompanied with the revival of the 
inductive method of reasoning, in opposition to 
the deductive. 

Art. 

There is but one goal for the aspirations and 
longings of the human soul, and all our studies, 
whether in philosophy, history, art, or religion, 
conspire to this one end, that is, that the soul 
shall know the truth, and be developed and 
matured thereby. Truth is, as I have repeat- 
edly said, the statement to the intellect of ob- 
jective facts, and spiritual truth is the statement 
to the soul of spiritual facts, in language which 



ART. 137 

it can best understand, whether that language 
be philosophic statements or pictorial images. 
A work of art which did not portray truth on 
the plane which it purported to represent, I 
should say was no work of art at all. A land- 
scape must be true to nature, even when the 
artist paints ideal scenes. The ideal is the true, 
the real, the spiritual, intellectually (not spirit- 
ually) discerned. 

Beauty is the union of truth and good, — 
that is, of the principle (the underlying reason) 
and the manifestation. There can be no beauty 
when truth, either on the natural or spiritual 
plane, is absent. Truth is the vital, creative 
principle. When the manifestation outruns the 
principle the forms degenerate, and we have 
that kind of beautiful which is false art and 
false life, and leads to artistic and moral death. 
The Greeks were perfect artists ; they were so 
organized within and without. Their gods were 
idealized men and women. They had an in- 
tuition that the human is the highest of forms. 
They could make the human grander, larger, 
nobler, nearer perfection, than the actual (which 
is always more or less blurred), but their in- 
stinctive genius and perfect taste kept them 
from ever vitiating the natural form by altering 
its fundamental proportions, as the Assyrian and 
Egyptian nations did in their monstrosities of 



138 LETTERS. 

three-headed and four or more-handed divini- 
ties. Such symbolism is indeed as inconsistent 
with beauty as it is with vital truth. From 
this false symbolism the Hebrews were wonder- 
fully guarded. " Thou shalt make no likeness 
of me " was the prohibition, because the infinite 
could not be at that time represented in any 
finite form without degrading and falsifying 
the idea. In the symbolism of Christian art 
the human form, when it represents the divine, 
is never travestied or made monstrous in any 
way ; only the expression of mere human beauty 
is so lost sight of in the conception of somewhat 
higher, that the human form suffers from deple- 
tion, as it were, but never from exaggeration or 
caricature. 

Great as the Greeks were, they had no spirit- 
ual conception, and could not have it, as it was 
not revealed to the human soul in their day. 
The world is infinitely richer since there has 
come into the human consciousness the concep- 
tion of a redeemed humanity (through the story 
of the Christ), which differs from the idealized 
humanity of the Greeks, as it recognizes the 
infusion of a life-principle from a divine sphere, 
subjecting the human and recreating it out of 
natural into spiritual beauty. Thus it is that 
Christian art prior to the Renaissance has a 
tenderer, deeper significance than the perfected 



REPRESENTATION. 139 

forms of Greek art because the underlying idea 
is infinitely more sublime, however imperfectly 
it may be expressed. . . . 

Representation. 

This is a world of show or representation, 
not substance, and the religions of the world 
educate men into the belief of this. It is only 
philosophy (which differs from religion in ex- 
plaining the causes or the why of things) which 
educates the more advanced minds to see the 
why and wherefore, the meaning and signifi- 
cance, of religious rites and dogmas and doc- 
trines. Probably the majority of persons live 
in the senses, and this may not be a sensual 
life (which is another thing), but a life of keen 
appreciation and enjoyment of all that this 
material life has to give ; and a vast deal of the 
beautiful this world has to offer. With keen 
senses and perfect health, the sailor, the trav- 
eler, the artist, may revel in all the multitudi- 
nous sights and sounds of this beautiful earth, 
and it is a good and legitimate joy. I would 
not underrate if I could the grandeur of skies 
or the magic of falling waters. But no soul 
can live in these appearances. There is no will 
nor choice in it. The sailor, the traveler, the 
artist, is compelled by his nature, more or less 
according to his development, to put into the 



140 LETTERS. 

starry heavens and the rolling seas the majesty, 
the sublimity, the marvelous melancholy, which 
come entirely from within, and constitute his 
own soul's contribution to the picture. It is 
he, and not the stars or sea, that burns and 
longs and sparkles. Thus even in the sensuous 
life, if it be only pure and simple, there are 
almost unlimited sources of enjoyment, — almost, 
but not perennial, because man is not made so, 
because the human constitution is not simple, 
but complex. If man were merely emotional 
and affectional, he might possibly get his fill of 
enjoyment in this atmosphere with pure senses 
and uninvaded health. But he is not made so. 
That is the crucial fact. There is a world 
within of religious, moral, and aesthetic senti- 
ments. He pines for the unseen, he longs for 
union and communion with the eternal and in- 
visible. He must know that somewhere or 
somehow God is, and cares for man. Thence the 
religions of the world. Thence the highest re- 
ligion, as being the expression of the best and 
most developed of the human race, that which 
most perfectly represents eternal truth, namely, 
the Christian religion. 

Multitudes outside of Christendom are edu- 
cated according to their capacities and needs 
by their racial religions, and in Christendom 
multitudes are kept in purity of life and sanity 



REPRESENTATION. 141 

of mind by the observances and doctrines of the 
Christian religion. The vital value of these 
observances and doctrines is that they represent 
in a symbolic way spiritual or universal truth, 
and therefore are vitally important to the edu- 
cation of men and women, and are absolutely 
necessary in the development, preservation, and 
stimulating of the interior life. The majority 
of Christian men and women demand nothing 
more. To externalists of whatever phase or 
degree, these observances and beliefs are the 
best culture they can have. There are some 
who are born with a tendency to grow into a 
deeper self-consciousness and a more exhaustive 
rationality, and they cannot help saying, What 
does all this mean ? Why does the Christian 
world pour into churches, and pray and preach 
and sing anthems ? And it is in vain to try to 
stop this why and wherefore. If we do we 
drive it into skepticism and agnosticism. I 
have come to see, in all this Christian expres- 
sion, movement in the right direction. It is the 
education of the multitude through pictorial 
and intellectual representation and symbolism 
of universal, spiritual realities or absolute truth. 
To know the why and wherefore is philosophy, 
not religion. Religion is the training of the 
emotions, sentiments, and understanding, and 
the adjustment of the habits and observances 



142 LETTERS. 

of life to one's highest conception of truth and 
good, however this truth and good may be in- 
carnated to the imagination and faith of the 
worshiper. Thus the Buddhist and Mahome- 
tan may be religious though not Christian. 

As I have said before, the Christian religion 
takes its unquestionable superiority and sub- 
limity from the fact that what it stands for is 
truth, the fact of things, and not falsehood. 
We see this when we come to look upon it 
philosophically, or with an insight into the 
eternal reasons upon which it rests. 

I think self-abnegation and self-denial are 
taught in the Christian Church, because, like all 
the rest of its teachings, it represents a spiritual 
condition which is only attained in this atmos- 
phere by aspiration and conception. Christians 
are not spiritual any more than the rest of the 
world. They are religious. They believe in 
and worship that which represents the spiritual, 
and the most advanced come into spiritual con- 
ceptions, not spiritual realities. Self-abnegation 
and self-sacrifice belong to Christian discipline, 
as they do to the discipline of all religions, 
but they are not especially Christian doctrines. 
We must do the highest we know always, what- 
ever sacrifice of feeling or personal good it may 
involve. So did the oldest pagan hero. So 
does the sincere Buddhist. This is all reli- 



REPRESENTATION. 143 

gious and moral culture, and of great benefit 
when regulated and controlled by the clear 
light of reason. Sacrifice of any kind, unguided 
and unenlightened by reason, is the very essence 
of fanaticism. This is why it is always dan- 
gerous for persons who are led and governed by 
feeling, instead of reason, to go outside of the 
express direction of Christian ordinances. They 
run into fanatical actions, and are not fit guides 
to themselves. There are fanatics in all reli- 
gions ; the Christian religion has abounded with 
them ; it is the religious sentiment running wild. 
No sentiment or affection is to be trusted 
unguided and unguarded by the understanding 
and the reason. Therefore it is that common 
sense is so often a safeguard to persons who are 
not capable of a more inner perception. Com- 
mon sense, which is the average intuitions of 
the human mind, is a good and faithful servant,- 
though plain and common of aspect. He is 
worthy of respect, and keeps the mass of man- 
kind in due order. We must do faithfully, ac- 
cording to our best abilities, the work of the 
day, of whatever kind, following out our noblest 
aspirations, as long as these aspirations them- 
selves are under the control and guidance of 
the highest reason, or the most rational concep- 
tions made known to us through our own intui- 
tions, or those of wiser or more matured minds. 



144 LETTERS. 

The aspirations themselves are all feelings. 
They are impulses or desires born of concep- 
tions or images of the true or beautiful or good. 
No feeling is safe as a guide. It is a spur, an 
incentive, the very spring and push of life. It 
is life, and not death. But it needs light and 
direction. This the Christian communion fur- 
nishes to myriads. 

The point of danger is always when the soul 
begins to go alone — to pick out its own path. 
I must repeat, feeling, however lofty, is never 
a safe guide. It must be controlled by the best 
judgment of what is most fitting and consonant 
to the highest welfare. 

I use the words "natural" and "spiritual" 
in a different sense from their ordinary use. I 
call everything natural, every phase of thought 
or feeling or action that belongs to the consti- 
tution of man in his creation and development, 
over whatever spaces of this world or others 
that development may occupy. There is a 
natural order and there is a spiritual order in 
the universe. Every possible creation, includ- 
ing man in his whole constitution, is at first 
natural, that is, governed and supported by 
opposite principles of life of which he is un- 
conscious, and between which he has only a 
phenomenal and educative choice. Thus, nat- 
ural life is a collision, a struggle, an effort, an 



REPRESENTATION. 145 

unrest, guided and governed by a divine Provi- 
dence, but not at one in or with itself. It is a 
process of growth, of development, of becom- 
ing. And such process throughout nature is 
always a ferment, a bubbling, an interchanging, 
a striving, and so must continue (time is noth- 
ing) until its opposite and opposing elements 
are brought into equilibrium or balance. All 
nature, in whole and in detail, is an illustration 
of this. This is a natural condition, and is 
perfectly innocent and legitimate, and in the 
order of divine Providence. It is not to be 
blamed or despised. It is simply the method 
of creation that the natural order must always 
precede the spiritual, the time of fruition and 
completeness. 

I consider religion, whether emotional, senti- 
mental, or practical, to be, strictly speaking, 
natural to man. It constitutes his highest nat- 
ural condition. I honor all religious persons. 
The more devoted, sincere, internal they are, 
the more I honor them ; but I do not call them 
spiritual, neither in condition nor conception. 
They are religious, ethereal, ideal, but not 
spiritual, because this latter term stands for a 
universal or completed condition. 

This world, this initial state of existence, is 
not to be despised. Indeed, it is a grand foot- 
stool for ascent. We get here the foundation 



146 LETTERS. 

of our knowledge both in human and divine 
things. We shall always be human, and I do 
not believe there is any real knowledge of man 
or nature but has its service and use for man. 
We must do the duty of the day serenely, 
trustfully, looking forward into endless vistas. 
The ideal is within and about us, — the ideal in 
art, literature, and life. These voices call us 
upward and onward. 

Symbolism. 

Symbolism lies at the foundation of all my- 
thology, indeed of every form of religion. All 
religions have their mythology, because there 
are certain spiritual or universal truths that 
can be conveyed to the mind only through the 
medium of myths or narrative form. 

These myths are forms merely. When they 
convey spiritual truth they are true in the 
highest sense, not necessarily true to the exter- 
nal understanding, but true to the imagination 
and the sentiments. All creation is a picture- 
book or i-epresentation of what would not be 
apprehended through mere rational statements. 
Thi^ is what I mean when I say that every fact 
in nature, even every form and mode in and of 
animal life, is symbolic, or represents a fact 
more internal and universal than itself. 

In all religions, in every form of speculative 



SYMBOLISM. 147 

thought, the serpent especially, of all animal 
forms, has always represented and expressed 
the principle of selfishness, self-worship, or the 
most internal principle of self-love, separated 
from its controlling partner, universal love. 
There are two kinds of love in our moral con- 
stitution, as there are two kinds or two sides 
to everything in the universe. Self-love, or 
the instinct to appropriate whatever is outside 
of us to our own use and benefit, is the very 
essence of our nature. Strictly speaking, it is 
not evil : it is natural. From the time the 
infant first takes food, all life is an imbibing 
and appropriation of somewhat outside of us 
to our own physical, mental, and moral growth. 
The evil begins when this appropriation is 
made, not from a love and worship of good and 
truth in themselves, but as ministering to our 
own personal greed of vanity or ambition, or 
to base and unworthy aims. 

If I love what is good and true, my appro- 
priation of them, in every form of thought 
or word or life possible to me, is not evil. 
This constitutes my moral growth. If I use 
my appropriations of knowledge to purely per- 
sonal, greedy, or base ends, they become in me 
moral evil, and stultify and deform the soul, 
instead of developing it. As illustration, we 
may say that to eat food as a child eats, from a 



148 LETTERS. 

simple and unconscious pleasure in juiciness 
and sweetness, is natural and helpful to the 
building up of the body ; but when the natu- 
ral instinct is transgressed, and eating becomes- 
a thing in itself, as to the epicure and high- 
liver, then the results are disease, physical deg- 
radation, and death. The moral side of all re- 
ligions is directed to the control of self-love, or 
the instinct of self-appropriation, by the awak- 
ening of the affections in the love of others, or 
the awakening of the religious sentiments in 
the love and worship of divine attributes in 
some divine personality. The purpose and 
office of religion and morality are to keep the 
rampant self-love in its place as subject, not 
master. Now, of all animal forms, that which 
seems the most involved, the most sheathed, 
the most earth-clinging, is the serpentine. 
Some one has remarked that it puts forth no 
limbs nor wings : it creeps. I do not wonder 
that the fancy and the imagination have always 
seized upon it as the emblem of selfism, indi- 
vidualism, self-love in its most undiluted ex- 
pression. In religions, it is the worship of 
the material principle in nature, as opposed to 
the spiritual, or what represents the spiritual. 
For instance, the earth-worship, or worship of 
the python, in early Greece, was overthrown 
by the religion of Apollo, which was the purest 



SYMBOLISM. 149 

and sublimest religion of ancient Greece. You 
know the myth of Apollo slaying the python, 
— one of the grandest of the old myths. In 
the Hebrew myth, the story of the fall (so 
called) in our Bible, I consider the profoundest 
truth concerning ther mental and moral consti- 
tution of man, and their necessary development 
is conveyed in forms that are eternally true 
to the imagination. Man and woman are ne- 
cessary to each other. They are the comple- 
ments of one another. Together, they make 
society and perfect the civilization of the world. 
Apart, they run into savagery or weakness. 
Metaphysically considered, truth and good are 
one, the masculine and feminine sides of life 
united. Truth, separated from good, is imprac- 
tical, severe, unfitted for " human nature's daily 
food." Good, separated from truth, is unen- 
lightened, running into all manner of weakness 
and illusions. It is fatal when Adam and Eve 
separate and undertake to carry on the world's 
work alone. Adam needs the practicality and 
adaptability of Eve, and Eve needs the uni- 
versality and intellectuality of Adam. Satan, 
which is the name the imagination of men has 
given to the principle of evil, means separation. 
It is the separation or divorce of good from 
truth. The serpent sometimes represents also 
the acuteness of the natural understanding, 



150 LETTERS. 

never, I think, the divine wisdom. We must 
recollect that the finite principle, of which I 
consider self-love or selfism the representat'-^e 
on the natural plane, is evil only when in rebe ■ 
lion to the infinite. It is as essential in crea 
tion as in the infinite itself. It is only when it 
sets itself up in opposition to the infinite that 
it is Satan. All natural knowledge and quali- 
ties are good in their place. The cultivation of 
the natural understanding is right. Practical 
good sense is a virtue. Courtesy, discretion, 
prudence, are not spiritual qualities, but they 
are natural virtues and have their place. We 
can be perfectly high-toned and true without of- 
fending or unnecessarily irritating others. This 
is a sort of natural wisdom. I do not know 
why the serpent has ever been used to express 
it. I suppose the ring it makes with its tail 
in its mouth suggests eternity, which we always 
conceive as a circle, never as a line merely. 
But in all religious symbolism I recognize it 
as a wonderful emblem of selfism, individual- 
ism, egotism, materialism, or all merely natural 
forms of being, thinking, and doing, in opposi- 
tion to the controlling and sovereign principles 
of spiritual truth. 



TEE CROSS. 161 

The Cross. 

The symbol of the cross is of perennial 
wonder and interest. Symbolism is the lan- 
guage in which divine verities are conveyed to 
the apprehension of the human mind. It is, 
we may say, a great picture-writing addressed 
to the mind's eye or imagination, and through 
that stimulating the affection and sentiments. 
The religions of the world are all symbolic. It 
is through their religions that men and races 
are brought into contact with invisible realities. 
Philosophical statements can only reach minds 
that are philosophically developed, and as yet 
there has been no philosophical statement ^{vew 
to the world which covers the whole religious 
ground. Religions are not philosophies, though 
they can be shown to have a philosophic basis. 
Religions are addressed to what is most univer- 
sal in man ; that is, his moral and religious 
nature and his imagination. The imagination 
is the great incarnating power of the intellect. 
It puts into shape, or into the form of some ma- 
terial image, an idea that could not be otherwise 
expressed. The memory and affections take 
hold of the idea so expressed in its correspond- 
ing material type, and treasure it up, until, 
through the growth of the mind, the spiritual 
significance is discerned. 



152 LETTERS. 

All creation, material, supernatural, and spirit- 
ual, is the product of the union of two eternal 
elements, combined and manifested by infinite 
power and wisdom. These elements we call 
by different names, according to the planes of 
thought from which we contemplate them. 
We may speak of the infinite and finite prin- 
ciples, or of the spiritual or natural, accord- 
ing as we speak more or less internally or ex- 
ternally. They all rest upon the great law of 
creation, which is the union of opposites through 
sacrifice ; the lower or more external principle 
being subjected to the higher or more internal, 
as being the manifesting principle. There must 
always be present in any phenomena a crea- 
tive or manifesting principle, and a productive 
principle, or that through which the former is 
manifested. In every thought we think, there 
is the sensation from some outward object or 
fact, and the internal perception of the sensa- 
tion; these united produce the conception or 
thought, which is a thing in the mind, ety- 
mologically having the same root-sounds. The 
conception of union through sacrifice is the re- 
ligious phase of the profound philosophic idea of 
the product of all thought and fact by the sub- 
jection of the lower to the higher, — the use 
made of the finite by the infinite, or of the nat- 
ural by the spiritual. The cross, or the union 



TEE CROSS. 153 

in one diagram of two opposite lines, has always 
been spontaneously used to express or represent 
the union of opposites. It is the symbol spon- 
taneously furnished by the imagination to the 
religious sentiment. I should expect to find it 
wherever there was any genuine religious ex- 
pression. It represents the method of crea- 
tion^ — the use or subjection of the more exter- 
nal principle to the more internal or creative, 
for the purposes of manifestation. Creation 
could not be expressed or represented by the 
material symbol of a continuous line. It must 
always be a line crossed by another. There is 
no possible product otherwise than from the 
union of two elements. The cross is a ma- 
terial symbol representing the universal fact 
of creation. It has been particularly appro- 
priated to express the passage into the spirit- 
ual, because that is the ultimate and goal of the 
natural ; and the use and purpose of the reli- 
gions of the world is to suggest to the mind 
the fact of this ultimate destiny, and to train 
and educate the human being for it. The cross 
is as essential an idea in the creation of the nat- 
ural world as of the spiritual. Every spiritual 
fact is first a natural fact. The symbol is 
made more prominent in religious rites and 
dogmas, and preeminently in the Christian re- 
ligion, because, in the development of human- 



154 LETTERS. 

ity, man becomes more self-conscious ; and in 
the religious experience the outward symbol 
of the cross becomes an internal fact of the 
consciousness, — an internal symbol, purporting 
that the union with the divine principle of life 
can only be obtained through the sacrifice of 
the life principle of the finite, which is selfism, 
and the surrender of itself as manifestation of 
the divine purpose. 

Greek 31yths. 

The Greek myths are poems, and so fur- 
nish material to be vroven into other poems, 
■whether in music or verse. Their immortality 
is owing to the fact that they are true poems, 
that is, products of the imagination and the 
legitimate fancy, and so embody, or repre- 
sent universal experiences. The story of Or- 
pheus and Eurydice is of this kind. I think 
Orpheus is an historical person, probably the 
organizer of the religious and social instincts 
and intuitions of the early Greeks, doing a 
similar work to that ■which Moses did for the 
early Hebrews. That he was a person of re- 
ligious insight may be inferred from the ac- 
count that he interpreted the mysteries, that 
is, gave the esoteric meaning to what the people 
already believed. His music and poetry show 
him to have been of a highly artistic nature, a 



GREEK MYTHS. 155 

typical Greek, and the stories of what he was 
able to effect by his music and poetry do not 
exceed what we often feel, as if all nature were 
fluid and pliant to the inspirations of genius. 

The story of Eurydice gives a lovely picture 
of the sweetness and purity of the marriage tie 
in the earliest ages of the Caucasian or Aryan 
races. An imaginative story or myth may be 
interpreted by each one according to what it 
represents to that one's imagination, or ex- 
presses of his or her experience. The higher 
the myth, the more will the interpretation be 
one and the same, because the profounder 
the experience, or the deeper the insight, the 
more universal it is. What belongs to our 
common humanity is greater, that is, more 
representative of the spiritual, than what is 
individual to us. To me, the having brought 
Eurydice back and up from the land of shad- 
ows and darkness into the light of day, is 
the recovery of her in a more real and glorified 
personality ; but when, not satisfied with this, 
Orpheus looks back, to count his steps as it 
were, to analyze the ways and means by which 
he has come into this glorious possession, the 
radiant vision vanishes. This is my own origi- 
nal interpretation. I impose it on no one. I 
have felt myself the peril of looking back, of 
being assured by the senses of that which can 
only come through the higher intuitions. 



166 LETTERS. 

Human Constitution. 
Infinite life is the creative power in God, 
and finite life is that coexistent principle out 
of which and from which he has created the 
universe and all its contents. I do not believe 
in one divine life flowing down from the eter- 
nal through all his creations, and of which his 
creations are only modifications. This is the 
philosophy of Buddhism, and has crept in, 
under various disguises, through modern Chris- 
tian thought and phraseology. This subject 
is the most abstract possible, and it is difficult 
to state it in terms sufficiently simple. The 
finite mind cannot comprehend life in its ori- 
gin. I do not apprehend the infinite Creator 
as infinite life or infinite spirit. He is an ab- 
solute Being, in whose complex nature infinite 
life or spirit is the creative power, or, in reli- 
gious phraseology, the first person in the God- 
head. Man also is a complex being. He is 
not merely reason or sentiment or sense. He 
is all these combined and individualizt^d through 
a personal principle or will. I do not think of 
man, the human being, as a spirit, or a soul or 
a body, more or less, but as a composite crea- 
ture, body, soul, and spirit, made one through 
the individualizing will, but who has just got 
foothold in existence, who is in a very unde- 



HUMAN CONSTITUTION. 157 

veloped condition, and whose more or less de- 
velopment depends upon the more or less un- 
folding in his composite nature of the reason, 
which is the highest power in man, and the 
condition of which is always the consciousness 
of an internal personality by which he is a 
person, not a thing. Every normal human 
being has reason. It is that which differen- 
tiates man from the brute. 

But very few in this life in the material 
sphere we call earth, come into the self-con- 
sciousness of reason. In very few is rea- 
son an active principle, and even of these 
few no one has come into the fullness of it 
which belongs to a more exalted sphere of 
existence. Because human beings are sensu- 
ous, affection al, intellectual, artistic, it does 
not follow that they are rational. People dif- 
fer from birth in nothing so much as in the 
development of the reason. Therefore I do 
not believe human beings have as yet come 
into responsibility. There can be no respon- 
sibility, strictly speaking, without self-con- 
sciousness. We do not reproach any animal 
however it may simulate human vices. We 
do reproach men for the same acts because 
they are rational in germ and possibility ; and 
these reproaches and exhortations are the sub- 
stance of all religious training, and quicken into 



158 LETTERS. 

life the living germ of rationality. But strictly 
and philosophically speaking, human beings act 
from their mental and moral affinities, and 
are not responsible because they do not as yet 
know what they do. We are obliged to use the 
same words in different senses, according to the 
plane of thought we are speaking from. To 
train children or men and women, we are 
obliged to address them as moral and ac- 
countable, because this is the way to make 
them so. It is the educating process, the 
external fire that quickens the dormant inter- 
nal spark into flame. This is practical teaching, 
the preaching which is necessary for the whole 
world, of whatever clime or condition. But 
philosophically speaking, there is as yet no sin 
in the world, because there is as yet no spir- 
itually conscious creature. There is vice, which 
is the violation of natural law in one's personal 
experience ; there is crime, which is the viola- 
tion of social natural laws : but of sin, which 
is the conscious separation of one's self from the 
divine order, there is no possibility, excepting 
a representative or pictorial one. You will now 
understand when I speak of the forms of good 
and evil that abound in humanity as representa- 
tive forms of opposite spiritual principles. We 
look upon all human beings as in process of de- 
velopment. None of us have come into spirit- 



HUMAN CONSTITUTION. 159 

ual reality, only approximately. The majority 
of persons have no spiritual consciousness what- 
ever. They are conscious of desires, affections, 
wants, aspirations, but have not come into the 
light of reason, and so are not capable of self- 
guidance. They need to be trained by parents, 
teachers, churches, institutions, into habits of 
obedience to a wisdom higher than their own. 
Life must first of all be orderly, as you feel and 
say, before it can be beautiful. The passions 
and instincts must be subject to the sentiments, 
the sentiments subject to the teaching of the 
highest reason through instituted formulas, and 
the whole being brought into obedience to the 
highest law, however revealed. This is why 
you instinctively feel that obedience is the pri- 
mal virtue of the individual and the race. This 
is what is meant by the story that the first sin 
was an act of disobedience. 

The best lesson the children you deal with 
could learn is to obey a superior, not a master 
merely, though that is better than nothing, but 
to obey a superior in mind, morals, and manners, 
without question or hindrance, without hesita- 
tion or demur. It would be the first real step 
in education, intellectual or moral, the initiative 
into conscious life as distinguished from the 
mere instinctive. 

Great spiritual ideas are revelations always. 



160 LETTERS. 

The forms or statements into which they are 
put depend upon the intellectual status of the 
individual or the race. I do not believe they 
are evolved out of the progress of human so- 
ciety. I believe they are always revealed to 
certain great intuitive minds, and embodied 
in forms that can be apprehended by the im- 
agination and sentiments of the people whom 
they teach and train into these truths. 

The presentation of truth varies with the 
mental advance of the race. But the revela- 
tion does not. The form varies, but not the 
substance. We are not the religious and moral 
descendants of the ancient Phoenicians, nor of 
any pagan people. Our moral and religious 
ancestors were the Hebrews. The Hebrews, 
with all their narrowness, darkness, and con- 
fusion, were not pagans. They had a revela- 
tion of a spiritual God in so far as they could 
apprehend him through their great religious 
geniuses. The religion of the Hebrews never 
countenanced barbaric sacrifices. All their le- 
gends, like that of Abraham, emphasized the 
directly contrary. We have come down from 
the great Caucasian (or, as it is now put, the 
Aryan) stock, but our religion we have taken 
from the great Semitic race. I believe the rev- 
elation of a spiritual God was revealed with 
the very origin of man. Its forms have been 



HEREDITY. 161 

refined in the development of the sentiments 
and intellect. I know all this doctrine of evo- 
lution. I have read many works of its best 
advocates. While I do not doubt that much 
scientific truth is discovered through its ac- 
ceptance, I believe that a vast deal is left out, 
and that before you are as old as I am now, 
there will be a reaction from the overwhelm- 
ing and well-nigh irresistible materialism of 
modern thought. 

Heredity. 

The fact and law of heredity is indeed one 
of the most mysterious elements in our com- 
plex organization, and it is difficult to state 
it without overstating it. We are organized 
beings. To exist is to have the power of 
manifestation. To be manifested we must 
have an organism by which and through 
which we can be known. Our most external 
organism is our bodily senses and powers, 
which relates us to the material world that 
environs us, and is perfectly adapted to our 
physical constitution. There is a harmoni- 
ous interaction between the perceptions and the 
objects that minister sensations. No less true 
is it that our deepest emotions and farthest- 
reaching thoughts must be expressed through 
a material organism, the workings of a ma- 



162 LETTERS. 

terial brain ; and it is undoubtedly true that 
this material organization, this birth by blood, 
is transmitted from sire to son. But in every 
department of this complex being, man, there 
is a within and a without. The eye sees by 
the light of the sun and cannot see without it, 
but it is not the light of the sun that causes 
the eye to see. It is the union, or product of 
the union, of the external sensation and the in- 
ternal perception, that produces the phenome- 
non of sight. Sight is not the light nor the 
seer, but the product of the union of the two. 

So it is throughout our whole nature, from the 
most internal perception of material sights and 
sounds to the perception of absolute or spiritual 
truth. There must be two principles present 
always, — the phenomenon or the object pre- 
sented to the intellect, and the intuition of that 
which it is. All through our consciousness, 
the object or phenomenon on one side, and the 
intuition or law on the other, makes percep- 
tion possible. We inherit the shape, size, and 
power of our brains. We are related by blood 
to those who in the physical line have pre- 
ceded and will succeed us. But we are con- 
stantly and inevitably related to internal spheres 
which correspond to the internal states of con- 
sciousness ; and from and through them come 
the intuitions, each in its sphere and in its de- 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 163 

gree, which make thought, aspiration, worship, 
and knowledge possible. We act according 
to our mental, moral, and physical organiza- 
tion. The will or organized individuality only 
combines and controls these manifestations. It 
creates nothing. We are also created inter- 
nally with affinities for certain forms of truth 
and good, and we aspire and grow according to 
them. 

The forms of supernal life are multitudinous, 
and the affinities for this or that form or 
series of forms constitute the numberless in- 
dividualities. The will acts in the direction 
of the strongest affinities ; and the more these 
are allied to the pure and true, the more vital 
and beautiful is life. 

The Supernatural. 

If I should put on my hat and go to your 
house to-day to visit you, the act would be 
simply natural, individual, trivial, having no 
supernatural significance whatever. 

A fact or act to be supernatural must in 
the first place be primal, universal, racial, and 
then, through religious inspiration embodied in 
religious usage, be separated from secular to 
special use, and so become the medium of ex- 
pression, or the only language possible between 
the spiritual and natural orders of thought and 



164 LETTERS. 

life. Eating and drinking are universal facts. 
Wherever there is life, from its highest to its 
lowest forms, it is supported by imbibing. 
Every form of existence eats and drinks in 
order to* live. The eating and drinking go 
to constitute the environment, and the prin- 
ciple of life descends into it from an interior 
or superior plane. This is relatively super- 
natural to that of the environment. It is so 
because it represents a spiritual law. It is 
separated from its common or local use and 
becomes a sacrament or somewhat set apart, 
consecrated within the fane. This is the ori- 
gin of all communions. The influx of life 
from a higher into a lower environment, thus 
making it possible for the lower to live at 
all, is the great central fact of the universe. 
Drummond recognizes it as the great natural 
law pervading the natural and spiritual worlds. 
I insist that it is supernatural on every plane, 
because it represents what is relatively spirit- 
ual ; and to do away with the term is to cut 
out the most expressive word in the language, 
as in cutting away the fact we should make all 
revelation impossible. 

The descent of life from the higher to the 
lower environment is received unconsciously 
by that which it enters, because there is no 
consciousness apart from life. The descending 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 165 

life must bring its own consciousness. The 
vegetable world knows not how or why it is 
supported from the animal, nor the animal from 
the human, nor the human from the superhu- 
man. The environment is furnished from be- 
low. The principle of life, with whatever more 
or less of consciousness it may bring, is from 
above, and the meeting of the two, the environ- 
ment and the life, constitutes a new organiza- 
tion or individuality. When we come into the 
interior spheres of human individuality, this 
influx of life includes all the wide phases of 
religious consciousness. 

There could be no experience without the 
condition and the influx. These two are abso- 
lutely necessary, and they are always super- 
natural, that is, representative of spiritual law, 
as method according to which the worlds were 
made. The religious consciousness never knows 
the method, only the fact. It is a religious mys- 
tery. On this material plane the supernatural 
influx of the Christ into the soul cannot be 
a matter of consciousness, but is received as 
represented by the religious life of Christen- 
dom. Our life is a life of faith. 

Every attempt of the individual worshiper 
to pass into the spiritual life in this atmos- 
phere results in individualism, self-exaltation, 
and fanaticism in its various forms, according 



166 LETTERS. 

to natural temperament and organization. It 
is the evil one. " Lead us not into temptation, 
but deliver us from evil." 

Now the great question comes, What is this 
Christ, the influx of whose life into the soul of 
man constitutes spiritual life ? The Christ is 
the eternal, universal manifestation of the life 
of deity — the outermost of God, — the divine 
body, the minister of God, as our body mani- 
fests every thought of our interior nature, and 
we could have no manifestation without it, and 
could make no revelation of ourselves to an- 
other. By the Christ, which is his most exter- 
nal sphere. He made the worlds and makes 
himself known to man. But the worlds are 
material, ethereal, and spiritual, and it is never 
directly, but only in a supernatural, represen- 
tative way, that the life of God in Christ can 
be brouffht down to the human consciousness 
and made the educator and developer of the 
soul. So this material universe is a sphere of 
representation merely, — a great phantasma- 
goria where we learn the forms of things but 
never touch reality, which glory is reserved 
for the final condition. The Christ is the all- 
pervading, all-manifesting life of deity, rep- 
resented in a supernatural way through all 
the orders of creation, but manifested only to 
the prepared soul under spiritual conditions. 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 167 

The Christ is the one great fact of the spir- 
itual universe, — the manifested God, the face 
of the Father, the one central fact and doctrine 
of the Christian religion ; the one word for 
Christianity, tlie only name by which man can 
ever be redeemed into immortal conditions ; 
tlie mediator and only possible interpreter be- 
tween God and man. His blood or life-princi- 
ple is the life of the supernatural and spiritual 
worlds. 

Every manifestation of God, every possible 
revelation of his attributes or designs, is made 
through a man or men. Hence there is a line 
of supernatural men, and He who consum- 
mated the law of life in his own experience, 
transferring it from outward material symbols 
into a human experience, is especially the man- 
ifestation of the nature of the Father and the 
revelation of his will. He was perfectly man^ 
— that is, neither satanic nor angelic, not be- 
longing to divine or infernal spheres, but con- 
structed human, and passing a human experi- 
ence in this material and most external sphere 
of the universe. All his experiences were nat- 
ural and yet supernatural. I do not pretend to 
explain the phenomena of his birth, life, and 
death. I believe they were supernatural. I 
cannot explain the phenomena of my own life. 
I believe there are a series of supernatural 



168 LETTERS. 

facts of which we are utterly unconscious, con- 
stantly infolding and pervading our life. None 
of our lives can be read literally. Just so far 
as we are literal^ just so far are we clods of the 
valley. " The letter killeth." 

Growth. 

By " quiet " I do not mean passivity. There 
is a passive or receptive element in the human 
soul, but that which fructifies the soul is life, 
movement, communication, the giving forth into 
thought and word and deed. Growth is constant 
activity, the transition or passing over from one 
plane of feeling, thought, or activity to another. 
All growth, to use the phraseology of the day, 
is a mode of motion. The one vice is indolence. 
The etymology of the word is, to be free from 
dolor or pain. But pain is better. All life 
is the product of the interaction of opposite ele- 
ments. 

All history is the story of conflict. I do 
not believe in peace upon what I call the natu- 
ral plane, or the initiatory sphere of thought 
and life. All history is the record of war of 
tribe with tribe, nation with nation, or, more 
intellectually, of civilization with civilization, 
ideas with ideas, — the passing away with the 
oncoming, the past with the future. (See 
Cousin's " Introduction to the History of Phi- 
losophy."} 



GROWTH. 169 

The present is always a battle-ground. Not 
to feel, not to protest and assert, is not to live. 
Better to grow gray and wan in thinking and 
living and acting than be soft and sleek in the 
mere surface-life of pleased sensibilities. This 
is what earth is and means. You are right in 
standing out for the present. This earth is 
in its way as good and necessary as any hea- 
ven. It is a great error, and one which my 
philosophy especially repudiates, to believe that 
any divine or ideal life is to be reached by 
setting aside or contemning the human and 
earthly. Whatever we may mean by " an- 
gel," no man should wish to be one by ceas- 
ing to be man. We could not be if we would. 
The inexorable law of creation forbids it. 
The door is bolted that way. Only in the 
perfection, the fullness of our human, can we 
join hands with the divine. I believe in the 
freest and fullest development. But we must 
first learn what this mysterious somewhat is, 
that in our consciousness we call our nature, 
and generalized we name humanity. How is 
its development to be accomplished ? Now 
the study of humanity, in ourselves or in his- 
tory or in contact with the world, constitutes 
moral thinkers. Our plan of study is not 
now in question. What we want to learn is 
the secret of this human nature, what it de- 



170 LETTERS. 

mands, what it craves as its greatest good, or 
fears as its greatest evil. The full manifes- 
tation of all that is in the soul, that is, the 
desire of man to express himself in life un- 
trammeled by any law but that of his own 
individuality, being in a word the law unto 
himself, has been expressed by moral and meta- 
physical schools in ancient times, and in latest 
of days by the various theories of freedom 
in extreme transcendental circles. Now these 
theories of unlimited freedom of development 
have been originated and advocated both in 
ancient and modern times by persons of ex- 
ceptional purity and elevation ; and the reason 
why they inevitably and necessarily degener- 
ate into viciovis maxims is because the doctrine 
of free development is but one side of a truth, 
and taken by itself is a falsehood, and the 
offspring of falsehood are necessarily crime 
and misery. There is no more valuable ex- 
perience than to see principles carried out to 
their ultimatum. 

Well, then, if the doctrine of unlimited free- 
dom of development as the highest good of 
man is falsehood, and would if not arrested 
lead to the dissolution of the soul and so- 
ciety, what is the truth? This, as I conceive 
it, that through every opening phase of hu- 
manity, on every plane of life, along with the 



GROWTH. 171 

struggling upward and outward into free ac- 
tivity, must be present the conserving and con- 
trolling element, the principle of subjection, 
and under these two opposite forces humanity 
is held in safety and sanity, like the planets 
revolving around the sun. This has been al- 
ways recognized under some form. In ancient 
times, the Stoics opposed and neutralized the 
Epicureans ; and in ancient and modem times 
religion has taught the necessity of some re- 
straining and subjecting power. In our modern 
thought it appears as religious and moral ob- 
ligations ; but philosophically considered, it is 
the conservative element in creation. 

I have come to see in Christianity the state- 
ment of a profound philosophy, a statement of 
the ultimate harmony between the conflicting 
principles of development and subjection. In 
other words, Christianity is the statement to 
the reason, that is, a philosophic statement of 
the ultimate union of the human and divine, 
and the method of that union. This method 
is never the crushing out or destruction of the 
human, but its renewal and transfiguration. 
The Christian religion is not a philosophy ; 
no religion is. All are addressed to and realized 
through the affections, sentiments, and imagi- 
nation. It is as true as ever that man believes 
with his heart. 



172 LETTERS. 

It is comparatively few who turn round and 
demand a reason for their belief. And yet 
this is the best, the noblest, and truest thing 
to do. The mind especially asks the meaning 
of things. It is the intuition of the intellect 
to ask. What does it mean ? 

Just now thinkers are more interested in 
studying external nature than their own souls. 
I feel sure that there will be a reaction from 
this. I believe in the revival of theology. 
By that I mean the science that treats of God 
and his relation to man. You will not doubt, I 
think, that I believe in the earth, that is, in 
that plane of thought and life on which man 
is working upward into the fullness of human- 
ity, — through toil, through conflict, through 
thought, coming into the realization in his con- 
sciousness of the whole secret of life, namely, 
to know himself, and so to know the human 
race. 

I believe in a revelation, more or less 
obscured, but growing clearer and clearer, of 
the fundamental fact in human nature, that 
is, the relation of humanity to its Creator, 
and that is the burden of all religions. The 
Christian religion, as I have said, represents 
this revelation in forms suitable to the needs 
and conditions of individual souls. The ex- 
ternal organization of Christian churches is the 



GROWTH. 173 

supply to what men in some of their phases 
demand. It is always right to oppose the false, 
to protect the weak, to face down the tendency 
in human nature to tyranny and lordship in 
church or state or private life. This is work 
to do, good work, and in so doing does one 
emancipate his own soul and help on the life 
of the race, for we are so bound up that good 
or evil to us is so to all. There is a solidarity 
of the race. I believe in the earth and in 
earth's work, and that nothing in creation sur- 
passes it in importance and necessity ; but it is 
one side, and there is an upper and under side 
to the crystal globe of life. I believe also in 
heaven, that is, in the fruition of man's life 
in its union with the divine, or divine human- 
ity, wherever or whenever in the ages that frui- 
tion may be. The practical service of this be- 
lief, this essential idea underlying Christianity, 
its value here and now, is that it alone keeps 
human life pure and true. It is the conserving 
principle arresting the precipitous rush into the 
seen and temporal, and, by setting a barrier 
upon the absorbing hunger of individualism, 
making human society possible. It is indeed a 
philosophic axiom that man individually and 
in society is saved, that is, preserved in the 
integrity of nature (integrity meaning whole- 
ness) by hope. 



174 LETTERS. 

Religion is the aspiration, the stretching up- 
ward to the ideal, the life crowning the actual. 
The Christian religion is the promise of the 
divine humanity, the Christ of God brought 
out upon the plane of the actual. As such I 
consider it represented in Jesus of Nazareth, and 
so made a tangible reality to the faith and hope 
of men. 

I consider that Jesus of Nazareth has repre- 
sented this ideal to the Christian world. I take 
this merely as fact. The disputed whole ques- 
tion of why and how the Christian church have 
taken him as their head does not touch the fact 
of history that such has been the case. The 
story of Jesus has arrested and fixed in time the 
conception of the divine humanity, and so has 
been of incalculable benefit to the world, which, 
untouched by abstractions, can only love and 
adore the divine in human form. 

T^e Amotions and Sentiments. 

I consider the emotional nature to be more 
superficial and external than the sentiments. 
These are departments of the mental constitu- 
tion which seem to be separated not so much 
by doors as by waving and folding portieres, so 
that we pass from one to the other by easy and 
almost imperceptible gradations. The most 
external mediums of knowledge of that which 



THE EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTS. 175 

is objective to our personality are undoubtedly 
the senses. The note the mind takes of the 
objects presented, is called sensible perception 
and reflection. These objects awaken our af- 
fectional nature, and produce what we call emo- 
tions, or movement out of, which are simply 
more internal sensations. We designate the 
sensations as hot, cold, soft, hard, bright, and 
dark ; and we designate the emotions as joy, 
sorrow, hope, fear, love, hate, admiration, and 
contempt. Observe how all these states or 
conditions go in pairs or opposites, showing 
the dual nature of the human constitution. In- 
terior to these emotions or internal movements 
are the sentiments, which, as their name im- 
ports, (the root-word being mens or mentis^') 
partake of an intellectual or rational character. 
Of the sentiments, the moral and religious 
are the highest, expressing themselves through 
a controlling sense of obligation or duty — 
that which is due or owing. 

Spiritual or absolute truth, apprehended by 
the individual, is incarnated or embodied in 
that form of thought or feeling which is most 
characteristic of the individual at the time. 
The majority of people are self-conscious only 
to the extent of sensations and emotions which 
the influences of life and thought educate and 
deepen into sentiments. This is the reason 



176 LETTERS. 

why religious teaching and observances are so 
refining. They open the nature from within, 
and bring into the light of consciousness the 
world of the sentiments, transforming the crude 
feelings or emotions of hope, fear, gladness or 
grief, which we share in a certain way, more 
or less, with the animal world, into the senti- 
ments of hope, love, adoration, duty, awakened 
by recognition of supernatural forms of thought 
and obligation, into which no mere animal ever 
comes. 

All religions are emotional or sentimental, ac- 
cording to the status of their adherents. The 
normal human being is neither one nor the 
other exclusively, but is designated as one or the 
other as the emotional or sentimental side pre- 
dominates in his make-up. External people, if 
of a quick, lively nature, are generally very 
emotional, and such people give what I think 
you would call color to society. They are full 
of emotional life, and contrast pleasantly with 
more stolid temperaments. But deepening life 
and experience bring them into the region of 
reflection. Here thought comes in. Religion 
tones the emotions into sentiments or internal 
emotion, as emotions may be called internal 
sensation. The call of the true or Christian 
religion is always to think. " Think on these 
things," it says. 



THE EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTS. 177 

Now this semi-intellectual world of the senti- 
ments is not the affections, the understanding, 
nor the reason. The affections or instincts are 
the underground of our whole nature, the mo- 
tive power or ground-spring of human life. 
The understanding includes all the intellec- 
tual powers, or what we generally call mind, 
and the reason is the highest department of 
this. We know perfectly that the majority 
of men and women are neither intellectual 
nor rational. The intellect and reason are 
latent, present but latent. Now the intellec- 
tual world, or the processes of the understand- 
ing, do not induct us into the region of super- 
sensuous ideas and conceptions. This appre- 
hension of and attraction to supersensuous 
ideas and images belong to the vast interior, 
unexplained region of the sentiments, the sen- 
timents of veneration, adoration, intuition, and 
obligation, to which religion is addressed. Re- 
ligious people have right on their side when 
they say that religion does not come through 
the intellect, but through interior experiences. 

In some persons the intellect or understand- 
ing predominates over the sentiments. Their 
minds are clear, incisive, logical. They de- 
mand to understand rather than feel. Such 
persons make up more or less the denomina- 
tion of Unitarians. They set aside the ele- 



178 LETTERS. 

ment of mystery. They are, as a general fact, 
educated, well-to-do, highly conscientious and 
moral, and contemn all feeling that does not 
issue in good conduct. The more emotional 
class of Christian sects take in the less cul- 
tivated, more impressible classes. The great 
organized churches, the Catholic and Episcopal, 
take in the more conventional, less individual 
class of minds, those that delight in order, pre- 
cedent, authority, and the stateliness and poetry 
of symbolic forms. Of course you will under- 
stand that this classification is ideal. 

Actually the churches are a conglomeration 
of persons, opinions, and conditions. It is only 
the more earnest portions, the thinkers, always 
rare in any community, who choose their mode 
of worship and religious instruction. The 
majority go where their fathers went, and think 
no more about it. Every one is right to go 
where he or she finds the best nutriment to 
mind and heart. Every healthy human being 
has affections, emotions, sentiments, understand- 
ing and reason, more or less active. We speak 
of a person or institution or race according to 
its characteristic qualities, the quality which is 
uppermost at the time and colors all the rest. 
The presence of reason, or that mental power 
which perceives the inner cause or law of phe- 
nomena, is rare even in intellectual persons. 



THE EMOTIONS AND SENTIMENTS. 179 

. . . Reason teaches us to wait, not to hurry 
or expect solutions of the insolvable. Do not 
try to solve the problems of life by too in- 
tense thinking. Wait, cultivate quiet, and the 
light will often come of itself, — frequently 
in some unexpected way. There is an intel- 
lectual humility which is as sweet in its way 
as moral humility. It consists in being will- 
ing to be kept in tutelage. The highest minds 
on this earth are in a state of development, and 
see things more or less partially. That is why 
persons seem lacking in breadth and depth. 
There is no universal person. That belongs 
to the spiritual era, which will never be in 
these material conditions. We have a great 
deal to learn, and there is a great joy in add- 
ing to our store little by little. 

Was it not Lessing who said that if God 
held absolute ti'uth as a gift in one hand, and 
in the other the powers and opportunities to 
obtain it, he would take the latter? so pro- 
found was his sense of the joy of degrees, the 
supreme satisfaction of growth. Every good in 
the universe is oi-derly and comes in the fullness 
of its time. . . . Besides the emotional, senti- 
mental, and practical phases of religion, there is 
a phase in which the reason is the predominat- 
ing element. This phase sees through all others, 
including them all, respecting them all, and as- 



180 LETTERS. 

signing to each its due place and utility. It is 
a divine nectar which more than anything else 
quiets the soul. It is resting in the depths of 
infinite wisdom. 

Holy Grail. 

Lowell has written a beautiful poem upon 
" The Quest of the Holy Grail." It is an un- 
dying legend, because it symbolizes an eternal 
fact in the soul of humanity. The soul of man 
is always seeking the cup of divine life. It 
is turned out of its path by the constant temp- 
tations of the senses. It often loses all be- 
lief in the celestial treasure through the blind- 
ing influence of evil desires. But the longing 
and the search "are persistent and immortal. 
As I have said before, the legend is of super- 
lative beauty and profoundest significance, and 
every heart and mind will put upon it, or find 
in it, its own interpretation, according to the 
intensity of the aspiration or the depth of the 
experience. To me it has the same symbolism 
as the cup which the Christian Church uses in 
its communion service. Both signify the re- 
ception of the divine life as something inex- 
pressibly more profound than eating of the 
bread, which is equivalent to hearing and 
obeying the truth. This is the reason why 
in the Catholic Church (the most representa- 



HOLY GRAIL. 181 

tive church because the most universal in its 
symbolism) the cup is partaken of only by the 
priests, who stand for a deeper initiation into 
spiritual knowledge, and the wafer, or the body 
of Christ, is all that is received by the laity. 
Remember, when I write this, I am speaking 
of what things stand for in their meaning and 
principle. I am not referring to any practical 
working. The ideal is the true and rational 
meaning. 

We know what close allies all the arts — 
painting, poetry, music, and certainly archi- 
tecture — are to religion, because they seek to 
express universal or spiritual ideas in indi- 
vidual forms of line, tint, or melody. All reli- 
gious rites, the preeminently Christian rites, — 
for instance, baptism and the Lord's supper 
(to speak only of these, though I consider the 
other sacraments as equally significant), — are 
really high art, as expressing universal ideas, 
or universal facts in the soul's history, in ap- 
propriate material forms. These forms are 
appropriate because there is a perfect corre- 
spondence between the use of water in bap- 
tism and the purifying influence of Christian 
teaching and supernatural influences from 
above ; and the most sublime correspondence 
between eating the consecrated bread and 
drinking the consecrated wine, and the re- 



182 LETTERS. 

ception into the soul of divine truth and life. 
Humanity has always been taught its pro- 
foundest truths through the imagination and 
the sentiments. Legends like the Holy Grail, 
have educated the soul through centuries. That 
men have not understood their significance 
mattered little. The profoundest knowledge 
does not come through the understanding. 

Opposites. 

When I speak of oppositeness between the 
divine and human, or the spiritual and nat- 
ural, the fact involves no fault nor crime nor 
sin on the part of the human and natural, only 
that man must be created opposite to God in 
order to have any human individuality. His 
destiny is to be united to God, and there can be 
no union except through opposites ; and this 
union can only be brought about by the sub- 
jection of the lower to the higher through 
the sacrifice of love. You are created for a full, 
natural development ; first the natural, then the 
spiritual. You are called by your Maker to use 
all your powers of body, soul, and mind to the 
best and highest purpose that you at the time 
know. No inspiration is to be smothered, no 
talent cramped, no opportunity for larger life 
neglected, save under the restraining influence 
of a pervading and regnant sense of duty, 



OPPOSITES. 183 

which is the united outcome and expression of 
the moral and religious sentiments. Trust God 
nobly, and worship Him faithfully, and He will 
not fail sooner or later to lead you up into full- 
ness of life. We are here in our initial sphere. 
We are in a material body with material sur- 
roundings, but we are immersed in a supernat- 
ural sphere, which lies all about us as the air 
encircles the earth. Our life is fed from this 
higher sphere. Genius is inspiration through 
the imagination and reason from this interior 
sphere. Prophets and apostles are inspired 
through profoundest religious intuition into the 
knowledge of sublime, eternal facts respecting 
the relation of man and God, which they utter 
forth in a symbolism that ofttimes they them- 
selves do not understand. But the source is 
the divine Creator, the maker and ruler of all. 
There can be no direct communication between 
God and man. The infinite One is revealed to 
the finite soul only through mediums or medi- 
ators. The one great revelation of the union 
of the divine and human was made in the 
birth, life, and death of the Lord Christ ; a rev- 
elation of profoundest, universal, absolute ideas 
and facts through the medium of a great super- 
natural fact, patent to the apprehension of 
man. By the supernatural I mean every word 
or fact or event that intervenes between the 



184 LETTERS. 

spiritual and natural, and is the only revelation 
of the former to the latter. For the natural 
mind cannot, from its very nature, discover 
spiritual truth. It can only receive it through 
the language of symbolism, and that not until 
divine inspirations throw light upon the sym- 
bolism. The reason why the modern scientific 
spirit rejects all spiritual ideas is because it 
rejects the supernatural order. 

There are perceptions of the reason which, 
when we come into them, shed floods of light 
over all the phenomena of religions and life. 
There are primary facts that we must accept 
as we find them, or wait until we understand 
them, such as the distinction of races, as well 
as the distinction of individuals. One race is 
white and historic ; another is black and infe- 
rior. So one man is a Homer or Dante, and 
another digs a ditch. We accept these primary 
facts. Mahometanism and Buddhism are suita- 
ble religions for the nations to which they be- 
long. The Father of all takes care of all. No- 
body can go to a Christian hell excepting a 
Christian. 

Do not think of the divine nature as oppos- 
ing the natural. It never does. The Father 
is forever drawing humanity to his Son. No 
man can come to Christ unless the Father draw 
him, is written. The most opposite things in 



0PP0SITE8. 185 

nature are drawn to each other through their 
very oppositeness. The opposite poles of a 
magnet attract. The same poles repel. The 
attraction between man and woman is the at- 
traction of opposites. The passion of love is, 
when genuine, attraction of opposites made 
one by this supernatural medium. God is one, 
yet He is constituted as man is, who was created 
in his image in spirit, soul, and body, a trinity 
in unity. We approach Him through his 
body, or most external manifestation, which was 
represented on the plane of the senses in the 
man Christ Jesus. So it is true, taking it in 
its most universal sense, that we can only know 
God through Christ, the supernatural mediator 
between the divine and human. Try to form 
the most sublime, universal ideas regarding 
spiritual and divine things. Very good per- 
sons often narrow God down to man by their 
attempted definitions. 

There is no distinction respecting the inspira- 
tion, spirit, and personality of God. He is one, 
indivisible, — a divine person, but revealed only 
through successive manifestations of himself. 
We never err more than when attributing to 
Him feelings and motives borrowed from the 
human natural consciousness. We can never 
think too largely, too grandly, too sublimely, of 
God. He teaches us through the medium of 



186 LETTERS. 

great facts. We can understand no other spir- 
itual language. The greatest fact in the uni- 
verse is the revelation of the divine humanity, 
the union of opposites in the supernatural fact 
of Christ the Lord. 

Education. 
I think the acquisition of knowledge a very 
serious thing. If I thought of it only as an ac- 
complishment, it would lose its interest for me, 
but I believe it enters as an element into char- 
acter, and so probably forms the body of our 
spiritual life. In every one of us is going on a 
dual process, the development from within and 
the appropriation from without. We study to 
get materials for thought, and to think, that is, 
to look at our knowledge as a thing in the mind. 
To consider or sit down with it, to hold it as an 
object under the powers of our reflection and 
reason, is to bring it into the light of certain 
laws which are the intuitions of the reason, and 
by these laws we judge it and use it. For in- 
stance, here is a piece of Roman history, we 
will say the first four hundred years of Rome. 
The narrative charms of itself. From childhood 
up, we like to hear a story. Accustom your- 
self to tell that story, simply as story, to some 
friend or child, or better, write it out, as straight 
and simple a story as you can. No matter if it 



EDUCATION. 187 

has been done a hundred times. No matter 
if you can take down the book and read it. 
Put away the book, and write or tell the story. 
Then ask who were the onlookers to that story ? 
Who and what were the people that came and 
went, bought and sold, fought and were fought 
with, in this story, and what did each give and 
take of their best and their worst? Then seek out 
some prevailing quality of character and action 
that goes to make a national characteristic ; write 
these things all out, and you will have materials 
for thought when you come to compare this 
people with another, and are trying to find out 
what valuable element they furnished to the 
common life of humanity ; what marks they 
have left on time ; what is their immortality 
as a nation ; what result, in substance or in 
power, they worked out for the great life of 
humanity. One life explains another. What 
we are always seeking, is to get life explained. 
The child lives on spontaneously and unre- 
flectingly. The hour has not come when life 
presents itself as a problem to be solved, a 
mystery to be explained. 

History may be studied, as a story to be told, 
just as the child lives along and the day's occur- 
rences happen to it, and it likes to be told what 
happens to another child-, or man, or people, or 
nation. It is a series of happenings, and if 



188 LETTERS. 

they awake agreeable sensations or emotions, 
then there is happiness in the hfe or the story. 
There comes an epoch in every life when the 
mind stops in the midst of this flow of things, 
and asks why and whereto this is, or what is 
the meaning of this life ? Now we seek an an- 
swer that shall correspond to the depth or com- 
prehensiveness of the question. The answer to 
any question which a people or nation has put 
concerning its life and destiny, is the religious 
belief of that time or people. 

The early life of any great nation is like 
childhood and youth, in its unconsciousness, 
its spontaneity, its love of adventure, fighting, 
or hard play and hard work. The forms of its 
religious thought are the products of its emo- 
tions and imagination, more than of the under- 
standing and reason. Hence the mythology of 
all religions, or the narrative and personified 
form into which was put its notions and beliefs, 
intuitive or traditional, of God and man, and 
the relation between the two. I conceive that 
the child in its early life shares in the uncon- 
sciousness of nature : that which makes it es- 
sentially human, its inner personality, is not yet 
developed. It is more or less at the mercy of 
impressions and influxes from the world of na- 
ture, and the tide of emotive and intelligent life 
that is setting in through it from the great ocean 



EDUCATION. 189 

of humanity, out of which it is newly individ- 
ualized. It needs to be controlled and guided 
by a maturer intelligence and more developed 
personality. It is born into natural humanity, 
but is not yet grown up in it. In its humanity 
lies all its possibilities ; it must explore the 
ocean upon which it is launched, must learn all 
that humanity knows, and experience or trans- 
mute into its individual life all that humanity 
has learned and suffered. The child's destiny 
is, first of all, to be man. 

The beauty and charm of childhood is like 
the beauty of nature, only far more interest- 
ing, because man is made in the image of God, 
and is centralized by a personality which im- 
ages the divine ; only it is but a form — an im- 
age, not a transfusion. I conceive that human- 
ity is, in a special sense, a creature of God, 
but not yet a son. I do not know what nature 
is, unless it is in some way an expression or im- 
itation of humanity, or a creation of God with 
the personality left out. The unconsciousness, 
innocence, simplicity of the child, and even the 
childish virtues, belong to his non-development. 
It is true that he has just set out, just in a 
sense left the creating hand ; that heaven lies 
about him ; but the shutting down of the glory 
is the coming out into that for which he was 
made. He is more human the less he seems 



190 LETTERS. 

divine. The angelic nature of the child is a 
seeming only. There is no reality in it. It is 
the foreshadowing, the presentiment, of a re- 
ality that is to come. He must leave that in- 
nocence, that Eden behind him, — learn all the 
heights and depths of humanity, grow into a 
perfected human being, oppose himself more and 
more to that which created him, and become an 
opposite to God. This is hidden from the soul 
until the full time comes. Man believes that 
through his intellectual, moral, and religious ac- 
tivities he is drawing nearer to the Father, be- 
coming more and more the image of the divine ; 
and yet he is not deceived, for he is walking in 
the way he should go, taking the only route 
possible by which he can reach heaven at last : 
for the way is, to be man first of all, man po- 
tentially and actually, man in all the capabil- 
ities of knowledge and suffering, before he is in 
the condition or status to worship God. So that 
all our studies and efforts, our passivities and 
activities, bring us at last to the knowledge of 
ourselves, or humanity in our individual person. 
Just so far as we are conscious personalities 
are we emancipated from external nature, are 
we at the head of the natural creation, and 
ready for the divine offer of redemption. 



LAW OF SUBJECTION. 191 

Law of Subjection. 

We come into this world full of impulses 
and affections, without experience, because we 
must live before we accumulate the results of 
life ; and without self - consciousness, because 
that comes from the interaction of life and 
thought. As we develop, come into con- 
scious relations between our desires and sur- 
roundings, we find we are not free or isolated. 
There has been woven about us link upon 
link, and we find ourselves in relations with 
others, involved in duties and responsibilities 
more or less voluntary. Now we can turn round 
and assail fate (as we call it), and beat our 
brains out in spite on account of our surround- 
ings, which is the act of madmen ; or we can 
free ourselves from all that belongs to us, and 
rush out into the savagery of self-indulgence, 
and so lay up for ourselves future agonies of 
remorse ; or we may take the only wise and ra- 
tional course, which is to accept life as we find 
it, and, by bringing our highest powers to it, 
make it the best we can. 

The law of the universe is subjection. All 
nature moves in obedience to laws that restrict 
and restrain ; and the human mind and will 
work most strenuously and effectually when 
they work in harness. It is the mistake and 



192 LETTERS. 

folly of youth to suppose that growth and hap- 
piness come in freedom from limitations. The 
man is free by using his limitations to noble 
purposes and aims. No man is free to do as 
he pleases. He is only free to do what is right 
and best in the circumstances. Through this 
assiduity, and application of his mind to emer- 
gencies, he gains mental and moral strength. 
I think the true cause of the conflict in the 
modern mind between Christianity and non- 
Christianity is misconceiving or ignoring that 
the great underlying principle of Christianity, 
its philosophic element, is the principle of obe- 
dience. Man must obey something or he ceases 
to be man, — which word signifies a creature 
who means or reasons. Until the child or the 
child-man can perceive and obey the law of life 
revealed to the reason, he must obey external 
rules. Tims the rules of religion and moral- 
ity as embodied in the Christian Church are 
the external conscience of the race, until man 
comes into the perception of spiritual law in 
the reason. When he does so, he will see that 
the obligations of religion and morality, and 
the highest intuitions of the reason, coincide in 
enforcing upon man that the law of mental 
and moral growth, and the only way to peace, 
lies in the fact of self-renunciation. Nothing 
enchains us but the tyranny of a selfish will. 



LAW OF SUBJECTION. 193 

Our will is our individuality — is the organic 
unit of our whole being. When it is domi- 
nated by our desires and impulses which seek 
only their gratification, it becomes a slave ; 
and though apparently it has the liberty of a 
despot, it is all the time beating about in the 
narrow sphere of self-love, and feels the grat- 
ing and pressure of the invincible limitations 
that shut self in. It is only as the will rises 
into the region of principles, and sacrifices its 
selfism on the altar of truth and duty which 
represent universal laws, that the soul of man 
comes into true freedom. Some inspired poets 
have described this change as " being trans- 
ported to a large place." 

We know that the senses are good subjects 
but terrible masters, and we call a man ruined 
who is under their feet. Now the emotions 
are only internal sensations, more refined, more 
subtle, but they are utterly blind and unintel- 
ligent masters. To be ruled by them is to be 
torn by whirlwinds. Subdued by reason and 
subjected to the wise ordering of a concen- 
trated and disciplined will, they give all the 
softness and variety to life ; but like everything 
within us, their whole beauty and grace depend 
upon their subjection to something higher than 
themselves. 



194 LETTERS. 

Materialism. 
Yes, my dear friend, we must shut our eyes 
resolutely upon the swarm of material facts 
that bob their ugly heads up and down in the 
choicest domain of our thoughts. I am realizing 
as never before the reality of this temptation. 
In my best and clearest hours, I have accepted 
the sublime truths of Christianity as inter- 
preted by " The Philosophy," and their work- 
ing has deepened my consciousness, clarified my 
mind, and given elevation and scope to all the 
purest and most disinterested longings of my 
nature. These are as much facts as those hor- 
rible material facts that seem at times to swamp 
us. I will cling to what " The Philosophy " has 
given me ; the rationale of all Christian doc- 
trine and dogma in the constitution of the 
Godhead, — the rationale of revelation from 
and in the very creation of man. I believe 
man is a threefold being, a trinity, as is his 
Maker ; and that as we now correspond in 
our whole material construction to the ma- 
terial sphere in which we dwell, so there is 
another sphere, internal and ethereal, to which 
we as fittingly and perfectly correspond inter- 
nally, and upon which we shall open our eyes 
at the death of this body. That men miscall 
this other world spiritual, or that we, wearied 



MATERIALISM. 195 

and worn with the fret and fever of the pres- 
ent, can often think of nothing so sweet or 
good as to sleep on and on, a baby's dreamless 
sleep, does not alter the fact of things. The 
one belongs to that blur and confusion of 
thought in which most persons dwell, and the 
second belongs to our over-strained hearts 
and spirits. I have myself been painfully 
impressed by the dying out, as it seemed to 
me, of the wish to live again. But I believe 
it is one of our myriad experiences. We are 
bound to know and understand all the phases 
of the soul's natural history. I have found a 
certain power in being able to say to persons 
in bereavement, not that I had always believed 
and trusted, but that I had also protested and 
accused the living God of hardness and in- 
justice. So I believe it is not in vain that I 
can say to some world-weary and pain-weary 
hearts that I, too, have cared more to rest 
forever than to waken even to hallelujahs. 
And then, again, this experience is of service 
in freeing us from that petting of our own 
individuality which even fine persons have. 
It is a joy to me to believe that certain vani- 
ties and peculiarities, that cling to our identity 
here, will die out and be succeeded by a deep- 
ening consciousness of existence ; a sense of 
particular recipiency of the wisdom of God as 



196 LETTERS. 

we study hour by hour the method and mean- 
ing of his works, and become conscious co- 
workers with Him in the redemption and 
regeneration of the universe. We have so 
much to learn, and oh the joy and sweetness of 
learning it from no consideration of personal 
advantage ! — to study the wisdom, beauty, 
and meaning of God's universe for its own 
sake because He made it ! When Cardinal 
Newman speaks of music, even I have so fath- 
omless a swell of uninterpreted suggestions, 
and intimations float in upon the deepest 
spheres of my being, that I feel faint with 
the thought of what it must be to the musi- 
cally organized. And yet I shall be musi- 
cally organized there. The defect is in the 
most external physical construction. Crea- 
tion is an eternal poem set to the most ade- 
quate music. Stray bits of it come to the 
favored now. I have hardly dared to look 
too steadily into a star's eye, so ravishing 
away of the senses is even a gleam of beauty. 
I do not care what God will do with me 
when I die. If He puts me into the lowest 
purgatory, even He cannot put me out of place. 
If He will only give me some of his great 
books to read, some of his profound secrets 
to solve, I will praise Him and exalt Him for- 
ever. But He will do more than this. He 



MATERIALISM. 197 

will open within us the capabilities of love 
which have been hindered in expression. I do 
not mean the paltry, initial love which serves 
its turn here. But the joy of being enriched 
and enlarged in and by the act of giving one's 
self away is, I doubt not, one of the grand lines 
of the future. 

There are two cups of knowledge and of specu- 
lation put before us. One sparkles to the brim 
with the light of hope, cheer, personal dignity, 
sublime vistas, and is proffered by the purest 
attainment and keenest mental and moral in- 
sight. The other is thrust upon us by all the 
materialistic science of the age. It is nauseous 
to the taste. If we drink of it, we do it with 
a wail of despair. I cast it down and let it shat- 
ter in the name of the Most High. Whether 
evolution be true or false, one thing is true, — 
that man is made in the image of God, triune ; 
an image merely, natural, phenomenal, pic- 
torial ; and that he is made to be developed in 
this natural form until he becomes a full-grown 
natural creature. He must be first natural be- 
fore he is a candidate for the spiritual. To call 
a (supposed) half-bestial creature natural, as 
Mr. Fiske does, is an utter misnomer. He tries 
to drag in the ministry of Christ, making 
him a mediator between the bestial and hu- 
man, which is simply horrible, as the mediator 
must be bestial himself. 



198 LETTERS. 

Drummond's view is better. He makes a 
genesis of new life in man by the incarnation, 
calling this life spiritual, when we know it is 
only supernatural and representative, and that 
the founder of Christianity is both natural and 
spiritual and so supernatural, — the mediator 
between the two. Drummond tries to do away 
with the word " supernatural " altogether, not 
aware that he is doing away with the whole 
mediatorial region. This term seems to have 
become greatly vulgarized. It seems as if it 
were held as a term identical with the irra- 
tional, the superstitious, the non-natural. Let 
us do what we can to redeem it from these 
poor, trivial associations into the grandeur and 
breadth that " The Philosophy " gives it. It is 
the broad middle region, the only possible plane 
upon which the spiritual and natural meet. I 
see clearly that there can be no revelation to 
man other than a supernatural one. If divine 
revelation were not in mythical form, it would 
convey no spiritual truth to the human mind. 
There is nothing so sublime to my imagina- 
tion and conception as this grand, mystical 
region. The highest poetry, the profoundest 
music, contribute to it. I know why you are 
so moved by the story of " Clarchen." I know 
why love seems better than life, — that death 
is sweeter than life. It is the mystic principle 



GREECE AND ROME. 199 

of sacrifice that underlies all great thoughts and 
emotions. The doctrine of the cross must be 
reinstated to bring back into life any of the 
grand seriousness of eternity. Drummond does 
not see that in denying the supernatural he is 
cutting away the ladder between us and heaven. 
He seems to think he is doing a great work 
in bringing all possible experiences within the 
range of natural law, and that the great stum- 
bling-block is the term "supernatural." He 
does not recognize the necessity of the media- 
torial. This middle term is at the root of our 
" Philosophy." Let us cling to it. 

Crreece and Rome. 

Maech, 1885. 
I wish you could have been present at my 
talks. I have gone through the old Egyptian, 
Persian, and Hebrew civilizations in the light 
of *' The Philosophy," and the last two or three 
mornings have been upon Greece, and many 
new thoughts came to me. I reviewed its phi- 
losophy and culture until I brought it down to 
the feet of the great, universal, absorbing Ro- 
man Empire. I was newly impressed with the 
great agency of the Macedonian conquests in 
bringing the human race through Greek cul- 
ture to the point of personal consciousness 
which was necessary as a receptive condition 



200 LETTERS. 

for Chrisfcianity. Next time I shall take Rome, 
and show how it always, from its very begin- 
ning, represented universality and authority, — 
how it necessarily subjected to itself all other 
forms of human development. 

Rome was indeed the Eternal City. The 
capital and queen of the pagan world, it only 
passed on to a higher and more internal basis 
as the capital and queen of Christendom. It 
represents to my mind the authority, even 
despotic authority, of truth. It was the great 
conquering, comprehending, unifying, virile 
principle in human progress. I do not see any 
other time in history, save at this unifying 
point of the Roman sway, when the Christian 
ideal could have been introduced into the 
world ; and this Christian ideal was the doctrine 
of the divine humanity. Men longed to know 
God. There was no other way possible but in 
the creation of a divine-human sphere in which 
God and man should meet as one ; and there 
was no way to communicate this divine concep- 
tion to man excepting through incarnation in 
a supernatural human life. So I have come at 
last, after a life-long naturalism, to accept the 
life of Jesus the Christ as supernatural and 
symbolic ; and once accepting this, I stagger 
no longer at supernatural manifestations, though 
the same or similar ones surrounded the cradle 



BEREAVEMENT. 201 

of Buddha. And why not ? I feel bold enough 
to say. Buddha was supernatural — a revela- 
tion from the opposite or destructive side of the 
spiritual. I see more clearly than ever how 
purely transcendental is Buddhism. 

My very dear Young Friend : 

I sympathize with and grieve for you as 
another dear face and form is taken out of 
your home. I do mourn for those that are 
gone. Look at it as we may, under whatever 
elevating and inspiring influences, the fact re- 
mains the same. In death our beloved vanish 
out of our sight and away from the touch 
of our eager hands, and the pang of separation 
cannot be evaded. I know no way of escaping 
this pain. Our mortal life is full of it, and so 
I believe that the pain of itself clarifies and 
purifies. But there is surely something more 
than this ; and what is it ? All that I have 
learned seems so trite to say, and yet the com- 
monplaces of religion, words that are on every 
one's lips, cover the profoundest verities, the 
most startling and supernatural revelations, 
could we but realize these truths and make 
them actual to our lives as is the daily sun in 
the heavens. We must and do believe in the 
divine Providence that inwraps and mvolves 
our little lives as completely, as perfectly, as 



202 LETTERS. 

each drop of water is as full of the presence of 
the divine laws as is the vast ocean itself. With 
Him there is no little and no great. His work 
is perfect in all its details ; and it is eternally 
true that even the hairs of our head are num- 
bered. 

Then cannot we give up ourselves, nay, more 
than ourselves, the mother, the sister, the 
friend, for whom we would lay down our own 
lives, — cannot we give these dear ones away to 
that infinite love and care, feeling sure that 
they can never throughout the universe of 
worlds get astray, or beyond that encircling 
arm? 

I think that often, in the fervor of our human 
affections, comes the painful sense of how little 
we can do. Our utmost efforts are so impotent 
to save. It is only in the most unreserved, 
most abounding faith and trust in One who is 
mighty to save, that we give them away ut- 
terly to Him, — to be his forever and wher- 
ever, as they assuredly were his here and now. 

My dear girl, I have nothing to say but this : 
The more absolutely we trust Him, the deeper 
grows the sense of his sufficiency. 

January, 1883. 

.... I know well that every one must bear 
his own burden, that we all have a peculiar 



BEREAVEMENT. 203 

and individual constitution, and the form that 
sorrow and trial take to each one of us varies 
according to our individuality. And yet it is 
true, also, that we are all alike, — more alike 
than different, — all subjects of a Will that is 
over and above our own, all bearers of this bur- 
den of an ever-changing and progressive human- 
ity. We have a common lot. We all, sooner 
or later, suffer with sorrow and moan with 
pain ; and so we sympathize with and pity each 
other. No one knows better than I do what a 
help along the way is the sympathy of friends. 
But I sometimes think that we can help each 
other better, if we can only more deeply realize 
that we are one in another bond than that of 
natural joy and sorrow. We long with long- 
ings unutterable to sit together at the table, 
and to drink from one cup ; and that table and 
that cup are the spiritual truth and life which 
have been so symbolized by all Christian art. 
No wonder these symbols have been so cherished, 
so clung to by the heart of the race ! " Eat and 
drink." "This is my body and my blood." 
And I know nothing to soothe in sorrow and 
to assuage in anguish but the conviction that 
there is objective, absolute, spiritual truth and 
life, upon which in the hunger of the soul we 
may feed and grow and live, we know not 
when or how, and that this spiritual truth is 
the Christ of God. 



204 LETTERS. 

And yet I know it seems very cold and un- 
satisfactory to say that all we have of help and 
comfort is through faith in that divine human- 
ity through which, and only through which, 
God touches the soul. We are full of pain and 
tears, and faith seems so cold, high, and barren 
a path. It is so indeed, but there are allevia- 
tions and condescensions in the providence of 
God to the weakness of our humanity, — the 
tenderness and sympathy of our friends, the joy 
of serving and being served, the loveliness of 
nature, the suggestions of art, and more than 
all, far more than all, the inexpressible solaces 
of prayer, and the limitless suggestions and af- 
firmations that the longings and satisfactions of 
the religious nature give to the reality of the 
ultimate union with God through faith and 
worship of the incarnate or spiritual truth. 

It is our right to take every comfort and 
help by the way, — to listen to the voice that 
suits our present need, or cherish the sentiments 
that sweeten our cup. There is One who ap- 
portions the food and drink, and there is no 
haste nor hurry nor delay with Him. I be- 
lieve that everything comes to us in the fullness 
of its time ; and though I would gladly close 
this letter by saying, as so many religious per- 
sons do, that I have seen and heard of the 
glory of the Lord, I do not say it. I live by 



BEREAVEMENT. 205 

faith, a growing and deepening faith. Others 
may speak from knowledge. I know He gives 
me all the light I can bear. I am glad to know 
that He will not unbind our eyes until the full- 
ness of our time shall come. . . . 

The absolute need of every human soul is 
the same, and the infinite Providence infolds 
every soul like an atmosphere. I could give 
up the dearest object in the universe out of 
my love, into that divine, all - sufl&cing care. 
Always to be with Him, here or there, con- 
sciously or unconsciously ; always to be with 
Him, who is as essentially human as essentially 
divine, — to trust Him utterly ; not that He 
always does or always will bring or give what 
we call happiness, but that He will always do 
for us and ours that which He knows is the 
best. 

Oh, do not think, my dear friend, with the 
poet Tennyson, 

" How common is the commonplace ! " 

Great truths are commonplace because they 
are revelations of the universal or spiritual 
judgment ; but when they find us out in our in- 
dividual need, it is as if they were spoken to 
our private ears. Temporal things seem to roll 
together like a scroll, and we learn that the 
deepest cry of our heart is to follow Him, at 



206 LETTERS. 

whatever cost, and to give our beloved to Him, 
and to Him only. 

Every heart knows its own sorrow. Every 
heart knows that for its deepest pain there is 
no remedy but in the thought of God, our 
maker. Yes, I use the old-fashioned words : 
He made us and knows us as no human being 
does, or can, or ought. To trust Him through 
the doubt of the senses is, I truly believe, the 
greatest act of the soul, — the act of spiritual 
obedience. And the noblest instinct of the soul 
is to obey. 

Mat, 1865. 

.... I should hardly believe that dear F. 
could find strength anywhere to sustain this 
shock, did I not know the wonderfully recuper- 
ative power there is in the human soul, — had 
I not learned from experience and observation, 
not so much to wonder at what we pass through, 
as that things touch us so slightly, — that after 
all, in spite of moments of anguish and hours 
and days of weariness, we emerge from the 
shadow of distress and disaster so intact, so 
unspoiled of any real wealth, so unshorn of any 
vital strength. Nothing makes me so realize 
the value of every individual soul, and its su- 
premacy to its conditions, as the way it sheds 



BEREAVEMENT. 207 

disappointment and even bereavement. I know 
no one who can bear to hear this in the first 
access of grief. I know that sorrow loves its 
sorrow better than any consolation. How true, 
and beautiful because true — since truth and 
beauty are one — are the lines of Tennyson ; 

" Let Love clasp Grief, lest both be drown'd ; 

Let darkness keep her raven gloss : 

Ah ! sweeter to be drunk with loss, 
To dance with death, to beat the ground. 
Than that the victor Hours should scorn 

The long result of love, and boast, 

' Behold the man that loved and lost, 
But all he was is overworn.' " 

And yet it is not the victor Hours : it is the 
victor Soul. 

But we never believe that the future has 
anything to give so good as the past. There 
is a certain loyalty within that is offended if 
any one hint that any new joy can take 
the place of the old, that any other love 
can compensate for the vanishing of the old 
love. It is in vain to tell us that archangels 
will come in the room of our angels. We are 
jealous of the new-comers. The heart is not 
ambitious ; it would rather have the old content 
than a nobler newness. The soul in sorrow is 
homesick, and pines for the well known and 
dear, and faints before untried paths ; and I 



208 LETTERS. 

believe it is better to have its sorrow out. The 
deepest grief is comparatively momentary ; all 
the courses of nature are remedial. 

The sure onmoving of time, the successions 
of thought, the reactions of emotion, tend to 
restore equilibrium to the tortured sensibilities. 
The soul moves on ; its states vary and ad- 
vance ; and when at any marked point of its 
career it pauses for a new introspection, it finds, 
that the life that lies behind it, so full in the 
passing, so quivering with sharp thrills of joy 
and sharper thrills of pain, has filtered itself 
into a few facts of consciousness, or has crys- 
tallized itself into the perception of a truth be- 
fore which the soul stands and says : " I have 
bought thee at a price, but I could not have 
won thee for less." 

For her who has lost the tender and wise 
friend, the sure and gentle counselor, no voice 
is gentle enough to speak consolation. There 
can be no pressure on that wound tender and 
delicate enough, save that touch which is the 
breath of the infinite spirit. When that comes, 
no sun of May is so cheering, no June breath 
so healing, for is it not the shine within the 
sunshine, the aroma within the fragrance ? 



bereavement. 209 

My dear : 

My heart urges me to write to you, though I 
really do not know the right word to say in this 
very great bereavement. Great sorrows must 
be borne more or less alone. I know how far 
off and unavailing is the consolation friends 
would so earnestly offer, when all the stricken 
heart yearns for is to see once again the face, 
and hear once again the voice, that never were 
so beautiful and precious to us as when the veil 
of death has hidden them from our sight. Oh, 
how we think, if it could only be once again I 
What years of our life we would give for one 
recovered hour out of the impenetrable shadow ! 
But they do not come again. The beautiful 
in person, the lovely in spirit, the tender, gen- 
tle, and dearly beloved, do not come again. 
And our life would be sorrowed out of us, if 
God did not send his angels in their place. 
We could not bear it, we could not let these in- 
expressibly dear ones go, did not He who made 
us, and who has opened within us these deep 
fountains of human affection, himself draw near 
in his own profound, mysterious way, and in- 
fuse the strength we need. No human sym- 
pathy is delicate or efficient enough in our ex- 
treme need. But he does most assuredly, 
slowly perhaps, and little by little, so unseal 
deep, inner resources, so touch with anointing 



210 LETTERS. 

our blinded eyes, that we do come to feel the 
reality of his overshadowing providence, and 
to trust Him for now and ever. 

My dear, I cannot intrude upon you with 
more words. I know no other balm for the 
wounds of time than that deepening and up- 
lifting of our whole being which is the outcome 
of great griefs, borne in faith and trust. 

Extracts. 

There is one Creator, the Lord God of 
Hosts. He makes and governs man by and 
through man, but never lays down his creator- 
ship. I believe in development and in comple- 
tion. 

I believe in a glorified humanity, but not to 
the doing away of the necessity of an imper- 
fect and progressive humanity, any more than 
I believe that the time will ever come when 
children will be born full-grown, and so super- 
sede the cares and vexations of the nursery and 
school-room. I believe, according to the old 
catechism, that man is made for the glory of 
God, and to enjoy Him forever ; and having be- 
come completed, his individuality will be used 
as a medium for the creation by God of ever- 
renewing spheres of beauty. 

In the mean time earth exists for schooling, 
for discipline and development : it is the veil 



PROGRESS. 211 

woven around the too tender soul that would 
only be destroyed by premature light, but in 
whose inmost depths is the prophecy that it 
shall awake, and be satisfied when it finds it- 
self in the likeness of God. 

With the perception of universal law there 
comes a silence in heaven. 

On earth we talk and have our say, and the 
speech of some is silvern. 

In the golden silence, souls will blend with- 
out speech. 



Progress. 

We have lived long enough and felt deeply 
enough to know that " things are not as they 
seem ; " that pain and loss upon one plane of 
the soul's experience is but purification and 
gain on a higher plane ; that the world of 
reality lies interior to the world of the senses ; 
that the soul cannot be hurt nor hindered, 
strictly speaking, in its development, but by 
sure and inviolable laws its progress goes on, 
orbital like the earth, "now through shadow, 
now through sun," until it "comes full circle," 
and is then made capable of redemption into 
another and spiritual order of being and exist- 
ence. But that great preliminary development 



212 LETTERS. 

nothing can stop, and death is but one of the 
rounds in its ladder. It is very pleasant to me 
to think of those we call the dead as sharing in 
the same great development as ourselves, the 
same nature, the same primal faculties, and 
perhaps a not unlike discipline ; for earth ex- 
tends far beyond this corporeal change we call 
death, so that no one is cheated of full stature 
as a human being, no one is cut down in his 
prime, but each and all shall know the whole 
of earth, suck all its sweetness and learn all 
its limitations, ere they stand at the portals of 
Heaven. For a Heaven there is ; not merely 
a state or place for the departed, not merely 
a prolongation or a refining of earth, — this 
there is, too, beyond the grave, but that is not 
Heaven, — but a Heaven there is of absolute, 
spiritual conditions ; a rest from the finite ; 
a redemption out of nature into spirit. For 
those of us who have tested the whole of earth, 
either actually or essentially, is not this hope 
of Heaven, this faith in the offered redemption 
out of the bonds of nature into the freedom of 
spirit, — is not this faith the deep refuge of the 
soul, the only sufficing faith, the word of God 
by which we live ? Nothing can express to 
you what the mere dawning of this faith seems 
to me. We are not bound to climb forever and 
forever with blinded eyes and sinking heart, 



PROGRESS. 213 

and ever and ever slipping steps up and up the 
high, steep mount of goodness ; no, we may sit 
down at its very foot, and another will take us 
and carry us in his bosom, as a shepherd does a 
lamb. We need no longer wring our hands over 
failures, nor weep in anguish at the burden 
disproportioned to the strength ; no, for another 
has taken up our task. He will see that it is 
done, or let it be undone ; we have nothing to 
do but believe in Him. 



POEMS. 



NATUKE'S CONTENT. 

The reindeer loves his icy home, 
Nor murmurs o'er its stinted flowers ; 
Patient within his sultry zone 
The noiseless camel treads the hours. 

Dashing along his polar seas, 
The huge whale keeps his fleet career, 
Deafening and dark ; the vessel's keel 
Touches its wave in doubt and fear : 

Near him the mighty vortex opes, 
The whirlpool rears its dripping cone ; 
With the fierce storm he fiercely copes 
In his sea-wilderness, alone : 

Nor needs he other, — needs no band 
Of fellow-toilers ; hope nor fear 
Nor discontent his heart expand ; 
Harmonious to his savage sphere. 



NATURE'S CONTENT. 215 

Close to their birthplace and their kind 
The valley flowerets softly cling, 
Nor care how mountain tendrils wind 
On high, and far their fragrance fling. 

The bright-winged birds love well the hue 
They borrow from the lavish sun ; 
Them lures no northern heavens' blue, 
Nor cooler streams nor coverts dun : 

Thus too, the tribes that learn their notes, 
Their sweeter notes, in softer grot ; 
That song as unrepining floats, — 
All have and know and love their lot. 

All have their place : in happy bounds 
The fish, the birds, the flowerets grow ; 
Duteous and sweet the air surrounds, 
Obedient still the waters flow. 

All have and know and love their place 
Save man's lone spirit, careful clad 
In garments of the human race ; 
Nor duteous he, content nor glad. 

But passion-tossed and fancy-stirred, 
Longing and ever missing bliss, 
Lord of the happy beast and bird, 
Ah, wherefore and whereto is this .-* 
1839. 



216 POEMS. 



STAR-CHILD. 

In a pleasant chamber, close beside 

A lofty window, deep and wide, 

Stood a little bed, in whose bosom deep 

A young boy went to his nightly sleep. 

The window was as a crystal door, 

Opening out on the silent night ; 

And the radiance of the clear starlight 

Lay in white streaks on the chamber-floor, 

And shone on the pillow and the bed, 

And brightened the sleeper's beautiful head. 

And all the night, as one by one 

The shining stars went up the sky, 

They paused and looked through that window high ; 

And as each and every star in turn 

Like a crown of silver lustre shone 

Round the head of the boy, more still and deep, 

More starry and bright, grew hia innocent sleep. 

One night he awoke, and one star alone 
Through that lofty casement was shining down. 
He gazed and he gazed, till it grew like an eye. 
Placid and clear in the midnight sky ; 
Then the boy looked trustfully up and smiled. 
And the star looked brightly back to the child. 

The morrow he went to his pictures and play, 
But ever and often he turned him away. 



ONE HOUR. 217 

And smiled to his thought, as though a fair dream 

Were passing him and his sports between. 

The mother questions him gently the while, 
" Why does my boy look upward and smile ? " 
*' O mother ! O mother ! I would you might see 

The beautiful angel that 's watching me ! " 



ONE HOUR. 

Let me be content in this still room ! 
I have no past nor future : I will live an hour, 
One present hour, bounded and limited, 
An independent, self-existing hour. 
I nothing know nor see but only this : 
The sun is bright, lying in full, large squares 
Upon the brightened floor ; shadows of leaves, 
Or branches bare, tremble and leap, 
Then sudden rest, then interlace again, 
Shiver and wave and cross in dance grotesque ; 
The fire is pleasant, with its restless flame 
And soft uptending smoke : I will so live 
An utter, dreamless, unremembering hour. 
Alas ! a power almighty masters me ; 
Spirits invade my presence ; the loud wind, 
I needs must hear it, the autumnal wind, — 
It bears my soul reluctant from its rest ; 
(I am a mortal wrestling with a power 
That will not be put by ;) its moan, 
Its full, deep, swelling, sinking wail, 
It bears me to the everlasting sea ; 



218 POEMS. 

I hear its murmur in the mighty deep. 
The echo of the wide, the ever full, 
The omnipresent wail of Memory. 

A single hour ! a single fireside hour 
Of present being : there is never such ! 
An hour is infinite ; its elements 
Are in the past and future ; it is linked 
With universal time ; the wind, the wave. 
Tear it and rend it till it utter out 
Its note of the great concert. Life is one, 
And the autumnal wind, with sudden wail ; 
Or lisping breeze of spring ; the cricket's sound ; 
The very ticking of the household clock, — 
(Oh, this monotony, this sure return. 
Is it not in the soul ?) — all sounds, in moan, 
Or musical of joy, are echoes all 
Or prophecy, the Coming or the Been ! 
1840. 



DAY AND NIGHT. 

Light of Day ! How lovely, how divine, 
Thy revelations are ! each golden line 
And imitative mount of sleeping foam 
That on the o'erbending arch repose or roam, 
Their glory to thy magic influence owe, 
Creator and revealer of their glow ! 
Each shape of leaf, so deUcately clear, 
Imprinted on the light-obstructed ground. 



DAY AND NIGHT. 219 

The graceful openings 'mid leaflets near, 

Or crossing twigs, or nest obtrusive found. 

Thou turn'st, all-bathing Light, to portals sweet, 

The foliage kindling with thy myriad feet. 

Light of Day ! O Artist most divine ! 

What hues in hue, what forms of form, are thine ; 

Voiceless yet calling sounds from hill and dell, 

Viewless, yet making all else visible ! 

Alas, thou world-awakener ! vast and far 

Thy searching fire, from morning star to star. 

Thine is the living world ; thy power is shed 

On the material eye : thou showest not the Dead ! 

In deepest nook, the deepliest-shaded flower 

That hides dew-hiddeii in the morning hour, 

Is found at last by thy resistless power, 

And stands like vestal at discovered shrine, 

Drooping, yet lofty, shrinking, yet divine ! 

The tear-swelled eye, that loves the hiding night, 

The blind, dumb night, the dear, unspeaking night, 

Is yet betrayed by thee, unpitying Light ! 

One secret only is not tliine to show. 

One abyss unsealed by gleam or glow : 

Many thy sweet revealings from afar, 

Oh wouldst thou tell where vanished spirits are ! 

Beloved Darkness ! beautiful and sweet, 
The soft envelope of the weary eye ! 
With hush refining ever, dost thou seek 
The hut of noisy words and misery, 
The hut forgotten, ne'er forgot by thee I 



220 POEMS. 

All awe-inspiring is thy mute embrace, 

And erring brain and hand that overfill 

The glaring day with forms of busy ill 

Are cleansed with quiet for a little space. 

O Night, redeeming that thou bringest sleep ! 

The breath of childhood's statuary rest 

Goes up like incense in thy circling shade ; 

And those that sigh in sadness know thee best 

For sighs and tears and prayers that shrink afraid, 

Even in tliy bosom, at the woe betrayed. 

O Darkness, wakener of the spirit's beam, 

Moment of Inspiration, when the soul 

Is borne resistless on a mighty stream 

Of images and visions not its own. 

The gloiy passes, and the mortal form 

Lies mute and still and gasping from its dream. 

Like fainting priestess from the tripod borne ! 

Beloved Darkness, that with modest pride 

Bring' st out thy starry treasures, soft and slow. 

Filling with startling shadows, heath, and side 

Of sloping hill, and river's silvering flow. 

What know'st thou of the ever-gathering Dead ? 

Where are the beautiful ? the spirits rare 

That gazed through lustrous eyes and shining 

hair ? 
Athenian ones of every age and clime. 
Who moved about in drapery so fine 
Of rose and white that all the soul shone through, 
As light, pervading, fills the drop of dew ? 
And vanished childhood, — ah, that witchery ! 
Where has it passed, in sea or air or sky, 



TO MR. HALL. 221 

That sparkle of life's wine, ethereal glow, 
Where went it when it melted from below ? 
Oh, listen. Day and Night ! their wail is borne 
Back to the primal hour, earth's earliest home ! 

Ye cannot speak ? — then is your beauty vain, 
Your morning freshness and your evening glow : 
We scorn you, in our majesty of pain ! 
Some hour, some time, the patient soul shall know ; 
Some other Night shall come with deeper thrill, 
Some other Day with light resplendent fill. 
1840. 



TO MR. HALL. 

ON RECEIVING A VOLUME OF MR. EMERSON's ESSAYS. 

The book is full to mind o'erflowing, 
The picture bright to fancy glowing. 
Not to the dull, the cold, the lonely, 
Is home a magic word, but only 
To those whose soul, aU self above, 
Can find the common hearth divine. 
Where draperies and faces shine 
In the transfiguring light of love : 
So, gentle book ! thy lines that flow, 
" Golden and glad," my lip along, 
Receive amid their mellow flow, 
Secret and sweet, an undersong 
Of harmonies that rise forever, 
Linked with the spirit of the Giver. 



222 POEMS. 

The sunbeam streaks amid the leaves, 
Yet not displaces their soft line ; 
The rumiing brook the star receives, 
Its waters mingling with the shine : 
So from this soft poetic page 
The giver's spirit gleameth through, 
And inward flow the memories 
Of holy calls and opened skies, 
Of meekest prayer and worship free, 
And gentle might of sympathy : 
They mingle in the poet's song, 
And flow as flow its words along, 
Adding a charm its own transcending, 
And yet harmoniously blending. 

So, gentle book, with thee is wove 
A charm thy graceful life above. 
More music than the Artist meant 
Is stricken from his instrument ; 
For as the pearly lines flow on, 
Keeps time in gentle unison 
The music of a friendship high 
Of counsel true and ministry. 
And each to each in concord rare 
Blend as the perfect light and air. 
Christmas, 1840. 



PSA YER. 223 

PRAYER. 

God, how overfull art thou 
Of beauty ! how divine 

From the o'erarching heavens' glow 
To the earth's circling hne ! 

My eye with glad content is fraught 
To sit absorbed and still, 
Watching the workings of thy thought, 
The quickenings of thy will. 

The stirring grass, — is it aHve ? 
The shadows' graceful faU, 

1 would their wondrous secret rive, 
I long to know it all. 

This only can my spirit see : 
In thee they hve and move, — 
The sweet, the simple, and the free 
Out-tracings of thy love. 

Would I might share that spirit's glow ! 
Would thought and life might be 
A gladsome and obedient flow 
Of beauty caught from thee ! 

Make me a perfect summer-time, 
A blossoming, a growth, 
A living voice of love divine, 
A trembling ray of truth ! 
1841. 



224 POEMS. 



THE DYING ARTIST TO HIS WIFE. 

Written after reading William Blake's last words to his 
wife : " Thou hast ever been an angel to me." 

Have we not lived and loved ? 

Ay, lived a life intense, 

Each day a hidden mine revealing, 

In bars and veins of liquid gold, 

Its glowing thought and earnest feeling ; 

And every sunray falling free 

From out the urn of Deity 

Wove in our sovd its parted beams 

In rainbow hopes and starry dreams. 

Have we not lived ? when every morn 

Some fetter from the soul hath torn ? 

And in the freedom of our prayer 

We drew the breath of mountain air ; 

And in the grandeur of the skies 

We felt the strength of our uprise ; 

And streaked and tinged in thoughts of gold 

We knew the morning of the soul ! 

When every walk by ocean-shore 

Is lingering in moan and roar, 

And every sense is stUl imbued 

With the wild wanderings in the wood ; 

And every flower we pressed between 

Our hands stiU vivifies our dream. 

Ah ! smell you not the violet ? 

The blue-tinged odor floweth yet 



THE DYING ARTIST TO BIS WIFE. 225 

From off thy lips in song and word, 
And smile and glance are as the hoard 
Of sweetness, gathered as we stood 
By hill and lake and stream and wood. 

Have we not lived ? when every night, 

These garret walls to chaos shriven, 

Forwards and backwards to the sight 

A shining banquet-haU hath risen ; 

In flowed our glorious company, 

Poet and prophet, regal ones 

From cross and stake and battle thrones ; 

And still the tinted clouds would gleam 

Like waving tapestry between : 

White were their garments, without soil, 

And on their brow nor haste nor toil, 

But deep within the starry eyes 

The light of spirit victories. 

They fade, they sink, as fades away 

The light more radiant than day : 

In music from our lips would burst 

The truths these spirit guests rehearsed. 

Have we not loved ? Oh, not the dew, 
The myriad drops that sweet and far 
Touch the hot leaves at evening-star. 
Sheds half so seraph-bright a hue. 
Brings not so angel-winged relief, 
As soft in care and bright in grief. 
Life's myriad moments, every one. 
Its quivering, fleeting leaves among, 
Crystal and cool, thy love hath shone. 



226 POEMS. 

Have we not loved ? In hue and line 

I 've sought to stay the vision glowing 

Of Grace and Love my soul o'erflowing ; 

The child, in innocence divine ; 

The girl, her first deep thought concealing, 

But in her mystic eyes revealing, 

As stars through summer skies soft stealing ; 

The mother, with her gaze intense, 

The mother-Mary radiance, — 

Thou the creative thought awoke ; 

From thee the earnest imjiulse broke ; 

And pencil but repainted thee 

My visible Divinity ! 

And in the dark and hapless hour 

When, faint and sad and earth-inbound, 

I 've shrunk before the mighty power 

Of the inflooding sight and sound ; 

And hid mine eyes, and longed to be 

A mortal from the Godhead free. 

And fain would to the desert fly 

An exile from my destiny, — 

Then, while thy murmured music hushed 

The tumult of the soul away. 

From thine own radiant mind hath flushed 

A light upon the hidden way ; 

Thy clear, serenal glance could tell 

The missing key-note of the spell 

To the immortal powers inlying 

Like shut-in fire agasp and dying ; 



THE DYING ARTIST TO HIS WIFE. 227 

And in thy quick imaginings 

My spirit pruned its drooping wings, 

And from the rapture of thy eyes 

Relit its fainting energies : 

I knew that thou an angel wert, 

Bringing me bread to eat and wine 

From thy exhaustless thoughts divine, 

And thy unfathomed wealth of heart. 

Call ye it toil and poverty ? 

Have we not lived ? a streamlet free 

From out the sea of Deity ! 

A gleam of planetary light 

Upon the void, unfathomed night, — 

A thought, a victory, a will, 

A symbol of the Invincible ! 

A struggle from the Eternal Might, 

A ray of the Eternal Light, 

A segment of the Infinite ! 

I tell thee that these meagre walls 
Have been a palace, my beloved ! 
Pillared and roofed as monarchs' halls ; 
And thou, my spirit's Queen, hast moved 
Begirt in gems : I see them now. 
Glistening on robe and hand and brow ; 
Gems polished in the mine of thought. 
By faith and hope and toil inwrought, 
And flashing in thy crystal love 
The diamond's purity above. 



228 POEMS. 

Nay, earth is but a sumptuous gem, 
Bright resting-spot of winged feet ; 
It moves 'mid stars, and chimes with them 
Harmonious in motion sweet : 
I sway unto its melody ; 
I vibrate in its Sowings free. 
Day vanishes, the stars are gone, 
A sapphire radiance flashes down ; 
My soul floats off on a pulsing sea, 
I sink in the depths of Infinity ! 
1839. 



DREAMS. 

Come to me, bright Dreams ! 
Let not this night forever glide along, — 
This night, beloved of the partial noon : 
All common things rejoice in her caress, 
And throw their chiseled shadows pure and true, 
Re-uttering the calm beauty they receive. 
Come to me, bright Dreams ! 
And while the weary form lies motionless. 
And hand and Up are still, and restless eye 
Is pressed by night pervading, let the soul 
Disport harmonious to the magic hour ; 
While the great moon rolls onward round the world, 
And the moist air and swelling buds make inter- 
change of hfe 
In sure and true and wordless ministry. 



DREAMS. 229 

The day is poor and torn, and scarred all o'er 

With vexing trifles, and the facts of life 

Lie bare in weary sameness, echoed back 

In language long forgetful of its birth 

'Mid sounding stream and many murmuring leaf ; 

Day is bound down and hemmed and harnessed in 

By the stern rule of unremitting law, 

Cause and effect, — rulers inflexible 

Of human fantasy, that rears and stamps 

Like a young war-horse in the hated rein. 

All things go on demurely : night, the morn, 

In footfall regular ; the earth pursues 

In fruitless constancy the imperial sun, 

Who keeps the circled area of his state 

Inviolate from approach of meaner ball ; 

Still bears the seed the flower, and still the spring, 

By mildew blighted, fails in future grain ; 

Still summer's dust is dust, and never gold, 

Nor foamy bubbles, airy palaces. 

But Sleep upturns this iron-girted realm, 

And builds a dynasty fantastic, strange ; 

Day lawless breaks on night, and stars run wild, 

Glimmer and shine, in glorious rivalry 

Of the all-piercing sun ; in clearest air 

Light as a rose-leaf riven navies float. 

Nothing is strange ; we do all things and see 

In glorious freedom from astonishment, 

The dead return, and in their grave-clothes talk, 

Speaking old words in unfamiliar sounds, 

Looking upon us with remembered eyes, 



230 POEMS. 

That peer and glisten from a stranger face, 
Themselves and yet another ! 

Come, bright Dreams ! 
The day forever tells me what I am ; 
Day is a mirror that reflects us back 
In weariful identity. But Dreams ! 
In thee I stand upon a boundless wild ; 
I hear the roaring of its mighty herds ; 
My step grows like the leaping of the deer. 
And my eye shames the eagle ; or upborne 
Upon the ocean's breast I float sublime, 
Pilot nor steersman save the living Eye 
That fills the circling dome ; or in some vale 
Made cool by mountain shadows, and the scent 
Of curling blossoms, passively I sink, 
And hear a voice breathing upon my soul, 
The glory of the sky made audible, 
The voice of sympathy and love. 
Oh, such a sleep, so fed by vivid dream, 
Were worth a common day ; and I should wake 
To the worn sunshine and the old detail, 
Like one who in the nightly hours had found 
That fabled fountain of perennial youth. 
And drank thereof, and loved, and was reborn ! 
1842. 



SPRING. 231 



SPRING. 



How reticent is the opening, 

The opening dear and good of Spring ! 

It Cometh not with sudden glare, 

Smiting its joy on our despair, 

Bringing us rudely to the light, 

With brows imbound with winter blight, 

But soft and delicate and slow. 

As if too diffident to show 

The wealth it longeth to bestow. 

The vestal blossoms come the first ; 

On the bare, rugged branch they burst ; 

They come in frail and fickle weather ; 

They wait not though the east wind grieves, 

They stay not for the pomp of leaves ; 

(It were too much to come together !) 

But the leaves come when the blooms are o'er. 

Come in their turn, and nothing more. 

All nature breathes humility ; 

Ever a gentle self-disowning. 

As beauty for itself atoning ; 

An asking in meek courtesy 

Permission so divine to be, 

Lest its white purity should kill 

Man's heart with awe, not raise and fill. 



232 POEMS. 

You cannot tell when Spring is here ; 

You think to go into the air, 

And take her floral gift in hand, 

And kneel and bless her where you stand. 

The keen wind smites, she is not there ; 

The welkin lowereth gray and dim : 

Aside we turn in mute despair. 

When suddenly, from sky or ground 

Some breath or quiver, or the spring 

Of latent bird on sudden wing, 

A yellow sheen within the air, 

A shadowy odor to the sense, 

A flooding of a life intense 

O'er soul and body, tUl we seem 

To move in deeps of love supreme. 

And know the primal fact that lies 

As base beneath all mysteries. 

It passes, and the earth and sky 

Take the old area of the eye. 

But in unconscious, soulic cells 

For aye the vital glory dwells. 

Most delicate and tenderly 
Nature her secret great discloses, 
As if she feared to let us soe 
How near to God her heart reposes ; 
How near were she, how far off we. 
She passeth with a sad, grave blush 
From out our praise, as she would hush 
The pride that thinketh aught to know ; 
Yet on the goddess' parting face 



TWO HYMNS. 233 

Lingers a smile of kindly glow ; 
A gleaming benedict of grace, 
A promise of empyrean ways 
Crowning our short and solemn days ; 
A hint of high poetic mood, 
Atoned with gentleness and good ; 
A soothing thrill, a hushing touch 
That lifts the heart yet not too much. 



TWO HYMNS. 



God of those stars sublime ! I need 
Thy presence, need to know 

That thou art God, my God indeed. 
Cold and far off they shine, they glow, 
In their strange brightness, like to spirits' eyes, 
Awful, intensely on my naked soul ; 
Beautiful are they, but so strange, so cold, 
I know them not : I shrink, I cling 
Like a scared insect to this whirling ball, 
Upon whose swelling lines I woke one morn. 
Unknowing who I was, or whence I came ; 
And still I know not : fastened to its verge 
By a resistless power, with it I speed 
On its eternal way, and those strange eyes, 
Those starry eyes, look ever on me thus ; 
I wake, I sleep, but still they look on me, 
Mild yet reproachful, beautiful but strange. 



234 POEMS. 

Visions are round me, — many moving things, 
In clothing beautiful, soft and colored forms 
With drooping heads caressing ; eyes so meek 
And loving and appealing, but they hold 
A nature strange and different, each envtrrapt 
In its own mortal mystery : near they are, 
And yet how distant, — familiar, fond, 
Yet strangers all ! I know not what they are. 

And higher forms, from out whose mystic eyes, 
Gracefully curved and vestal-like, obscured 
By shading lashes, looks a being out. 
That seems myself and is not, — kindred linked, 
Yet most communionless : I know them not. 
Nor they know me ; nearest, yet most apart, 
Moving in saddest mystery each to each. 
Like spellbound souls that coldly meet in dreams 
Which in some waking hour had intertwined. 

Yet some, too, woven with me in a veil, 
Viewless, but all-enduring, — kindred love : 
Their eyes are on me like awakening light ; 
They touch my forehead, press my given hand. 
Smile rare or oft, or sit most silently ; 
Yet all is xiuderstood, — the watchful care, 
The sympathetic joy, and the unutterable wealth 
Of helping tears, — ail, all is understood : 
Sure these are me ; sure my affections, theirs. 
Awe-stricken thoughts and over-rushing sins, 
My hopes, my loves, my struggles, and my straits 
Are theirs to bear, to know, to carry out. 



TWO HYMNS. 235 

To sift, to learn, to war and wrestle through. 

Ah, no ! oh, no ! for every spirit round 

There is a circle where no other comes. 

Even when we lay our head upon the breast. 

And pour our thoughts as liquid jewels out. 

And feel the strength that comes from soul beloved 

Steal through our own as steals the living heat. 

Nurture and bloom into the opening leaves ; 

Yet is the spirit lone, — its problem deep 

No other may work out ; its mystic way 

No other wing may try : passionate hopes. 

Mighty yet powerless, and most awful fears. 

Its strength ne'er equal to the burden laid. 

Longings to stop, yet eagerness to go. 

Is its alone ; a wall unscalable 

Circuits the soul, — its fellows cannot pass ; 

The mother may not spare the child, to take 

Its youthful burden on her wUling heart. 

Nor friend enfranchise friend. Alone, alone 

The sovl must do its own immortal work ; 

The best beloved most distant are ; the near 

Far severed wide. Soul knows not soul. 

Not more than those unanswering stars divine. 

God of these stars sublime ! I need 

Thy presence, need to know 
That thou art God, my God indeed. 
Shield me, 'mid thine innumerable worlds ; 
Give me some point where I may rest. 

While thy unceasing ages flow ; 
Hide me from thine irradiated stars. 



236 POEMS. 

And the far sadder light, untraceable 

Of human eyes ; for strangers are they all, 

A wandering thought o'er the unlistening sea. 

Recall, Eternal Source ! and reassume 

In thine own essence peace unutterable ! 

n. 

A night of stars ! 

Thick studded o'er the sky 

From line of vision, vanishing high 

Into the far immensity. 

To where the dark horizon bars 

The earth-restricted eye. 

Brilliantly serene, 

In the near firmament. 

The brighter planets beam ; 

While from the void supreme 

The paler glories stream. 

Making earth radiant, 

As an angelic dream ! 

Athwart the gilded dome 
Sudden the meteor glides : 
The gazer starts, lest doom 
Of chance or change had come 
On that eternal home. 
Whose still sublimity abides 
Through ages come and gone. 

The moon is fondly near ; 
Pale, watchful, mother-like, 



TWO HYMNS. 237 

She smileth on our cheer, 
She husheth up the tear ; 
But with a holy fear 
These starry splendors strike 
The distant worshiper. 

Where mighty oceans sweep 
They shine afar ; 
Where softer rivers leap, 
Where trickling fountains weep, 
Where the stUl lakelets sleep, 
Gleams back each star, 
Like torches from the deep. 

In rapturous mood, 
Silent with clasping hands. 
And earnest brow subdued. 
The ancient Shepherd stood. 
As night to night he viewed 
These glory-clustered bands 
In Heaven's vast solitude. 

Borne ©n the mighty sway 

Of thought, his spirit ran 

'er the resplendent way, 

Leaping from ray to ray 

To uncreated day ; 

Then — " What is man ? " 

He sang — " The child of clay." 

A spirit answered, 

'Midst bursts of wavy light, — 



238 POEMS. 

Meekly and glad he heard, — 
" Man is the Son, the Word, 
The best beloved of God, 
With glory crowned and might, 
And stars are his abode." 



CLOUDS. 

Ye clouds ! the very vagaries of grace, 
So vrUd and startling, fanciful and strange, 
And changing momently, yet pure and true, 
Distorted never, marring beauty's mould ; 
But now ye lay a mass, a heaped-up mass, 
Of interwoven beams, blue, rose, and green, 
Not blended, but infused in one soft hue. 
That yet has found no name. A sudden thrill, 
A low, sweet thrill of motion, stirred the air. 
Perhaps a tremor of self-conscious joy. 
That the contiguous breezes, moving slow, 
Transmitted each to each : instant as thought, 
Yet imperceptibly, your form dissolved 
Into a curtain of so fine a stain 
The young sky-spirits, that behind it clung. 
Betrayed their glancing shapes ; a moment more, 
Solid and steep, and piled like earthly mount. 
With juts for climber's foot, upholding firm. 
And long, smooth top, where he may gladly fling 
His palpitating form, and proudly gaze 
Upon a world below, and humbly up, 
For Heaven is stUl beyond. 



CLOUDS. 239 

Stretches now 
The gathering darkness on the silent west, 
Smooth-edged, yet tapering off in gloomy point. 
With that long line of sultry red beneath, 
As if its tightly vested bosom bore 
The lightning close concealed. 
Ye fair and soft and ever-varying clouds ! 
Where in your golden circuit find ye out 
The Armory of Heaven, rifling thence 
Its gleaming swords ? Ye tearful clouds ! 
Feminine ever, light or dark or grim, 
I fear ye not : I wonder and admire. 
And gladly would I charter this soft wind, 
That now is here, and now will undulate 
Your yielding lines, to bear me softly hence, 
That I might stand upon that golden edge. 
And bathe my brow in that delicious gloom. 
And leaning gaze into the sudden gap 
From whence the lightning passes ! 

Night has come, and the bright eyes of stars, 
And the voice-gifted wind, and severed wide 
Ye flee, like startled spirits, through the sky 
Over and over to the mighty north, 
Returnless race, forgetting and forgot 
Of that red, western cradle whence ye sprung ! 

As wild, as fitful, is the gathering mass 
Of this eventful world, — enlarging heaps 
Of care and joy and grief we christen Life. 
Like these, they shine full oft in green and gold. 



240 POEMS. 

Or brightly ravishing foam : utterly fond. 
We seek repose, confiding on their breast, 
And lo ! they sink and sink, most noiseless sink, 
And leave us in the arms of nothingness. 
Like these, they pass in ever-varying form, 
As glancing angels, or assassin grim. 
Sharp-gleaming daggers 'neath concealing garb 

Might we but dwell within the upper Heaven ! 

In the immensity of soul, — the realm 

Of stars serene, and suns and cloudless moons, 

Ranging delighted, while far down below 

The atmosphere of life concocts its shapes 

Evil or beautiful, and smUe on all. 

As gorgeous pictures spread beneath the feet. 



O Thou, supreme infinitude of Thought ! 

Thou, who art height and depth ! whither is Life, 

And what are we but vanishing shadows all 

O'er the eternal ocean of thy Being ! 

It is thy will, the sunbeam of thy will. 

That perviates and modifies the air 

Of mortal life, in which the spirit dwells : 

Thou congregatest these joys and hopes and griefs 

In thee they beam or gloom, Eternal Sun ! 

Let them not come between my soul and thee ; 
Let me rejoice in thy o'erflooding light ; 
Fill up my being's urn, until a Star, 
Once kindled, ne'er extinct, my soul may burn 
In the pure light of an excelling love, 
Giving out rays as lavishly as given ! 



THE FUTURE IS BETTER THAN THE PAST. 241 



"THE FUTUEE IS BETTER THAN 
THE PAST." 

Not where long-passed ages sleep 
Seek we Eden's golden trees ; 

In the future, folded deep, 
Are its mystic harmonies. 

All before us lies the way, 
Give the past unto the wind ; 

All before us is the day, 

Night and darkness are behind. 

Eden with its angels bold, 

Love and flowers and coolest sea, 

Is not ancient story told 
But a glowing prophecy. 

In the spirit's perfect air, 

In the passions tame and kind, 

Innocence from selfish care. 
The real Eden we shall find. 

It is coming, it shall come, 

To the patient and the striving, 

To the quiet heart at home. 

Thinking wise and faithful living. 

When all error is worked out 

From the heart and from the life ; 



242 POEMS. 

When the sensuous is laid low, 
Through the spirit's holy strife ; 

When the soul to sin hath died, 
True and beautiful and sound, — 

Then aU earth is sanctified, 
Upsprings Paradise around. 

Then shall come the Eden days, 
Guardian watch from seraph-eyes ; 

Angels on the slanting rays, 
Voices from the opening skies. 

From this spirit-land afar 

All disturbing force shaU flee ; 

Stir nor toil nor hope shall mar 
Its immortal unity. 



TO R. W. EMERSON. 

Graceful and sweet and strong, 
Poet and Sage, thy lessons glow, 
The sheen refined of autumn's sun, 
The dawning day's ethereal flow. 

Thoughts of distant eras come, 
Veiled in mystical star-shine, 
Filling the imperial dome, 
Spirit-hour of earliest time ; 
Hour of faith with beauty's zone, 
Faith that scorns the weeper, Hope, 



TO R. W. EMERSON. 243 

And high resolves that bravely cope 

With the far sky, that soft and fine 

Involves us in its curve subhme. 

No vexed nor turbid thought, 

No passion's muddied sea. 

No dreams of foam and fury wrought 

Win melody from thee, 

But the quiet deeps of soul, 

But the spirit's ocean roll. 

Knelt we in the pathless wood, 
Which to heaven its branches rears, 
Stately growths, the taU and good 
Nurslings of uncounted years ; 
Filled with nature's darlings bold. 
Quick of foot and keen of eye, 
And where God, m evening gold, 
'Mid the whispering leaves is nigh, 
We might venture to prolong 
In our heart thy lofty song. 
Lay we by the mountain rill, 
And awakened from a dream. 
Pure as that, as deep and still. 
Ministered, Uke Hebrew seer. 
By waving wings that glance and gleam, 
Dark and lustrous from the stream 
Of inner deeps of joy and fear, 
Yet rich and purpled in the day. 
Like angels in high heaven's array. 
We might dare to look upon 
Hope and might and deed as one. 



244 POEMS. 

But we wander by a pool, 
Reeds and mires of sense among, 
And the air of heaven's song 
Floats above, far off and cool ; 
And the perfect light comes down 
On a plot to weeds o'ergrown, 
And the croak of earthly words 
Mars the music of the birds, 
That a ceaseless anthem keep 
In the Eden soft and deep. 
In the bridal bower apart 
Of the poet's inmost heart. 

Rays of the supernal light 
Fall not on our daUy eye, 
As the child in mild delight 
Glads him 'neath the common sky ; 
Gentle and accustomed lot, 
Keen and warm, yet wounding not ; 
But, as lightning pressing back 
In a fierce and vivid chain, 
Densest clouds upon its track, 
Then bequeaths the gloom again. 

Of the Godhead's mighty sea, 
Rare we taste the mystic wave. 
Not as at a fountain free 
Hastes the child to drink and lave, 
Simple haste and simple draught, 
"With recurring freshness fraught ; 
But as in a fevered dream, 



AUGUST SHOWER. 245 

In a parched, sirocco land, 
Hasteful touch and taste, and then 
See it vanish in the sand. 

In a narrow tent 

Linger we, and pensively, 

Time and time through wind-torn rent, 

Glorious earth and sky we see ; 

But the spirit's flight is bound, 

And as a majestic strain, 

Music to the artist dear, 

Pours its finer notes in vain, 

Falling on uncultured ear 

But as thrilling rush of sound, — 

So 'mid wonder and believing, 

Losing much and much receiving. 

Breathless with joy, as thought on thought 

Moves on in crystal form inwrought. 

Sweet shuddering as the stately sweep 

Unfolds new meanings deep in deep. 

Yet firm in reason's grand repose. 

As softly shines, as simply glows, 

As morning star or opening rose. 



AUGUST SHOWER. 

The gladsome music of the shower ! 
The hasting, tripping, mingling sound, 
Above, beneath me, all around, 

On bank and tree and flower. 



246 POEMS. 

The rose lifts up its lip serene ; 

The insect 's still, that restless thing ; 

He makes no noise, he stirs no wing ; 
So fresh he grows and clean. 

The branches thrill and drip, and bow 

Luxurious to the air ; 

How green they look, how sweet and fair, 
They gladly seem to know. 

And still it pours, the welcome rain, 

Far down its rivers creep ; 

The very roots are bathing deep, ^ 
The fainting roots of grain. 

Yet more ! exhaustless 'tis as love ; 
The bladed grass is full, 
The pebble-stones are beautiful, 

So cool and wet above ! 

A pause, — again, — it 's almost past, 
The flowers seem to think. 
As, gasping eagerly, they drink 

The fresh, the sweet, the last. 

The earth is like recovered child. 
Heeding not how an hour ago 
It panting lay and faint and low. 

So glad it is and wild. 

The lighted west ! O God of Love ! 
.Below, in silvery streams, 



AUTUMN LEAVES. 247 



Like to Aurora's softest beams, 
While gold bursts out above ! 



AUTUMN LEAVES. 

Woe, woe for the withering leaves ! 

Flimsy and lank and falling fast, 

Hither and thither, twirling and whirling 

In the freshening wind, in the bright blue sky ; 

Glistening and clear and keen is the sky, 

But it has no mercy, none. 

For the pitiful, pelted, driven leaves : 

I saw ye, leaves ! in your cradle lying 

On that day far back, — oh, where is it now ? — 

In your varied, velvety hues of green. 

That softer and softer grew to the eye 

As the loving sunlight went glancing by. 

Out of the dark, hard tree. 

Wonderful things, ye came ; 

A summer hour has passed, 

Sultry and red and stiU, 

As life were pressed down by a mighty force ; 

A summer rain has fallen, 

A liquid light and sound, 

And dripped the drops from your shivering edge, 

But they '11 drip no more : your hour has come. 

Remaineth the tree, but passeth the leaf. 

Into the damp ground silently sinking, 

Sinking, and matted in mud and in snow. 

Leaves nevermore, ye colored and veined, 



248 POEMS. 

Ye pointed and notched, and streaked round about, 
Ye circled and curved and lateral-lined. 
Protean shapes of the spirit of form ! 
With the Sun for a nurse, feeding with light 
Out of his bosom, and moon with the dew 
Filched from the air under secret of night. 
Tenderly nurtured and royally served, 
A company regal, innumerable. 
Crowning the hilltop and shading the vale, 
Clustering archly the country-house, 
And filling the eye of the passer-by, 
The wanderer's eye with tremulous tears, 
At the thought of its hidden blessedness. 
Its fount of life-gladness welling within. 
Shaded and covered from scorching outside 
By greenness and coolness and deep repose ; 
Leaves, the delicate setting of flowers. 
Tempering the ruby ; round the queen-blossom 
Modestly crowding, never self-seeking, 
Giving the beauty they seem but to follow ; 
Living meekly as leaves, only as leaves ; 
Yet were they reft from wayside and bower, 
From weed and from tree, — the gaudy flowers, 
Shameless and bold and tarnished all o'er. 
Would weary the eye like a shadowless wall, 
A glaring day that casteth no night. 
An eye without lashes, a mind with no thought 
Deep hid in its cell, a heart with no love. 
Never uttered, a home with no curtained room ! 
But ye are perishing, perishing fast ; 
So lovely, so soft, so graceful, so good. 



SUNLIGHT AND WHAT IT STANDS FOR. 249 

So many, so varied, — why were ye here ? 

Out of night ye sprung, tender and juicy, 

Unto night ye return, withered and scorned. 

Birds sung at your birth, and youth leaped to see ; 

But none to the burial gather, not one. 

Woe, woe to the spent and withering leaves ! 

I too am a leaf : one of a forest 

Seek I to be, and not part of the whole ? 

The wide Forest laughs, and crushes me carelessly 

As it sways to the wind of Eternity. 

Circlets and curves and veinlets and stems 

Must bow to the sweep of the merciless hour. 

The Eternal remains, and out of its depths 

Shall issue the sap, exhaustless and free, 

In forests as mighty and multitudinous. 



SUNLIGHT AND WHAT IT STANDS FOR. 

Thou morning Sunlight glorious ! 
Hail Seraphim sent down to us ! 
Hail Raphael from the Presence, come 
To grace and gild our mortal home ! 

I touch thy glittering robe with awe ; 

The golden mantle floats afar 

O'er hill and stream ; and yet its fringe 

Is by my hearth ; my own door-hinge 

Has opened to let in the Lord 

Of Beauty as he moves abroad. 



250 POEMS. 

Thy teeming touch with gems is full ; 
They sparkle sharply on the duU, 
Down-looking eye of lame and sick ; 
They start again, their hlood grows quick ; 
The earth-born, cowering Dark has gone, 
Gone with its whimperings and moan ; 
Another death-stream is passed o'er, 
A shining day-jaunt lies before. 

Angel and brother ! can it be 
So gracious thou, and this deep me, 
This far inlying force I feel 
Pauper for help, inert for weal ? 

Art thou the elder-born, God's joy, 
And human will the tottling boy ? 
Art thou his heir, his prince, his pride 
And Soul, the serf that runs beside ? 

If human Love is brother-born, 
Sprung from the same celestial urn, 
Be this the presence angel-bright, 
Be this the Raphael, this the Light ! 

This the pervasive, wondrous charm 
Old Midas wore, burnt clean from harm ; 
The sorcery that swift and bold 
Transmutes-life's sands to living gold ; 
The spell that kindles where it moves, 
Trailing its glory as it goes ; 



PRAYER. 251 

This be the common, grand surprise, 
The morning-break to watching eyes ; 
The stir, the leap to life again, 
The Memnon touch on heart and brain ; 
The calling to the open door 
Whence path and progress lie before ; 
Sun and sunUght, rayer and ray, 
Day-bringer and itself the Day. 
1848. 



PRAYER. 

O Thou who from a height intense 
Watchest our human destiny, 
See ! thou hast made us, soul and sense, 
To taste the rill of life — and die. 

Didst thou not give the hint sublime 
Of powers mature and love divine ? 
Didst thou not stir the soul's uprise, 
Lure on to deeds of sacrifice, 
And prompt the young, confiding tongue 
To sing its brave, preluding song ? 

Is this the outcome, Mighty Mind ! 
The broken hope, the wasted strife, 
The hastening like a wounded hind 
In pain and terror forth from life ? 

Ah, no ! When consciousness began, 
The spirit of the living Lord 



252 POEMS. 

Within the pulsing ear of man 
Uttered one sweet, ethereal word ; 
Full tenderly its echoes roll 
Through the soft chambers of the soul, 
And symbolized to ear and eye 
Passed out in creed and prophecy ; 
A promise and a vision given 
In yearning earth and brooding heaven : 

We linger in the senses' night, 
Their mortal deafness shuts our ear ; 
StiU floats from out the house of light 
The spirit's rare, translucent sphere, 
A note that, pure from earth's alloy, 
Vibrates like rhapsody of joy : 

The will to do, the power to be, 
Awhile in inner cells withdrawn, 
Await in silent ecstasy 
The pearly coloring of the morn, 
When, quivering from the touch divine, 
The soul with new-born eyes shall learn 
(As pass the blearing spots of time) 
Eternal visions to discern : 

Made sweet from self s enfeebling stream, 

A sea of purity inflows, 

And folded in the law supreme, 

She drinks the rapture of repose : 

Whilst, bowed in mute, adoring thrill, 

Descend from heights no mind can scan 



SUBSTANCE AND FORM. 263 

The vital tides of thought and will, 
The Godhead passing into man. 

O Whisperer ! breathe in tones more clear ; 
O Helper ! bow thy heavens down ; 
The subtle shapes of doubt are near, 
They crowd and cower us in our gloom ; 
We sit within our darkened room, 
Let in the day through heavenly doors ! 
Oh, crown us with the light of noon, 
Set our weak feet on shining floors ! 

Not yet, O nursling Soul ! not yet ; 
Still must the tender lips be wet 
With milk of faith, — the narrow stair 
StiU guard the wavering will with care : 
When the full heart is ripe and free, 
The bridegroom hasteneth to thee. 



SUBSTANCE AND FORM. 

As heeds the child with spirit gain 
The fairy tale or mythic rhyme 
That wakes a vision in its brain 
That suits its dream of coming time, 
So hear I, as the pages tell 
The secrets of Egyptian cell, 
What arts the covering years infold. 
On pristine walls what records bold 



254 POEMS. 

Of times as soft as times of May, 

Of man as innocent of care, 

Of forms of social life as fair, 

More fair perchance, more near divine, 

Than those that mould this life of mine 

And thine upon the earth to-day. 

As he who earliest pyramid 

From iron bolt and bar undid, 

And entering crypt and crypt inmost, 

Stood in the central chamber lost 

In awe before the clear footprint 

On falling dust the sure indent 

Made ages upon ages gone, 

Now first to human sight made known ! - 

With tenderer shudder, nobler awe, 
I mark the clear imprint of Law. 
Some God has passed with foot sublime 
And touched the quivering sand of time, 
And earth throughout its deep recess 
Forever keeps the soft impress. 

Substance and Form make interstrife. 
One rising as the one declines, 
The fairer form, less real the life 
The deepening substance rends the lines. 

From pastoral play and shepherd song, 
From manners docUe, wise, and still. 
Leaps forth the race to war and wrong, 
To deeds of victory and will. 



SUBSTANCE AND FORM. 255 

Fairest the soul in earliest years : 
jEnone, 'mid her bowers of dew, — 
What rainbows glisten through her tears, 
What music in her words of rue ! 

The Spirit calls, — the Acadia 
Of outer life is rent and gone : 
The inner caves yawn blank and free, 
The soul must enter and alone. 

Pale Beauty passes with a moan, 
Harsh lines the inner strife betoken ; 
The teeming substance tears the form. 
The tender vase is bruised and broken. 

In sadness nears the soul its prime, 
Its mystic ringlets riven low ; 
The seal of victory divine 
Is set on temples bared with woe. 

Substance and Form make interstrife, 
One rising as the one declines. 
The fairer form, the shallower life, 
The deepening substance rends the lines. 

Fair Nature's forces fail to weave 
The perfectness of one and one ; 
Her the contesting powers aggrieve. 
The variance of Come and Gone. 

The aureal gleam in primal year. 
The tint untarnished of the New, 



256 POEMS. 

Is Eden but to eye and ear, 
Illusive gold on morning dew. 

The hint and foretaste of the hour, 
Hid in Eternity's deep mine, 
When life evolved to living Power 
Shall exhalate a form divine ; 

When soul and body, mystic pair, 
The dissonance of groveth outgone. 
Shall meet as peers in beauty rare, 
Eterne in spirit, blend as one ; — 

When form shall conscious life infold, 
Substance the vital form inspire, — 
That spheral love in lines of gold 
Shall radiate immortal fire. 



THE DAYS. 

July 16, 1835— Jijly 16, 1860. 

The summer air flowed fast and free. 
The summer glory shone, 
That other day we welcomed thee, 
Some twenty years agone. 

The sun still pours his golden rain ; 
And earth, as fond and fair, 
Tricks out her ever-varying mien 
In gauds of light and air. 



TEE DAYS. 257 

That other day — this other day, 
Like spirits they arise, 
Confront upon the parted way, 
And gaze with eager eyes. 

Gaze deeply into deepening eyes. 
And watch the shadows dim, 
As distant thoughts and memories 
Mount slowly to the brim. 

Is youth or hope or pleasure gone ? 
Then gently lay the sod ; 
Our foot is on their buried form, 
Our eye straight up to God. 

We wail not for the past and gone, 
We front the living ray ; 
We hail the present and the come, 
We greet our life to-day. 

Our hope has bloomed to memory. 
Our trust has flushed to faith ; 
Our love has won a clearer eye. 
The eye that looks through death. 

We count our time by victories, 
A triumph-arch of hours, 
Earth unto earth ; our calendar 
Is writ in stars, not flowers. 

The days — that other day and this — 
Athwart the edge of night, 



258 POEMS. 

They leap and blend in sober bliss, 
A trickling line of light. 

Pure from the dross of earth and pain, 
Move on the spirit-rays ; 
A sunshine seen through summer rain^ 
A bridal of the days. 



ARTHUR: A BALLAD. 

A story told by a colored servant who was witness of the 
tragedy. 

A SPARKLE on the brow and eye, 
A ripple on the lip, 
The youthful sailor gamboled by, 
The darling of the ship. 

So brimming with the wine of life. 
Mere living was a joy, 
The whistling winds a playful strife, 
The gray old sea a toy. 

He loved its cold, wide, sparkling brine, 
He loved its creamy foam ; 
He beat responsive to its chime, 
Nor feared its under-moan. 

Sheer off the tall old vessel's side 
He 'd leap in sportive whim : 
What finny thing could him outglide, 
Outdip, outdive, outswim ? 



ARTHUR: A BALLAD. 259 

So near to Nature's heart he lay, 
She gurgled in his ear 
A brave, relying roundelay 
That kept from fret or fear. 

So pure of heart, so lithe of limb, 

So healthy-toned and true, 

His comrades crowned him with their love, 

As crowns the flower the dew. 

One day, while dance and song betide 
And sport and revelry, 
A young child from the tall ship's side 
Fell prone within the sea. 

As springs a dancer from his place 
Sprang forth our sailor boy, 
Bore upward in his strong embrace 
And saved the infant joy. 

Now haste thee, Arthur ! close behind 
Two direful eyes are lurking ; 
Now haste thee, for the foul sea-fiend 
His deathly speed is working ! 

Alas ! too fearless and too brave, 
Our boy with careless aim 
Stabs quick the monster on the wave, 
Then seeks the ship again. 

Alas ! too proud in youth and strength, 
Too high of hope and mood : 



260 POEMS. 

The Horror leaps its measured length, 
The sea is red with blood ! 

My sable nurse, with eyes like rain, 
Told through the lonesome night, 
And murmured low the sad refrain, 
Too good, too brave, too bright ! 

O made for strength and made for love, 
And made for daring high ! 
O roses on the lip and cheek ! 
Life's lightnings in the eye ! 

O vigor from the wide earth gone ! 
O mournful hardihood ! 
And still my sable nurse sighed on, 
Too brave, too bright, too good ! 
1867. 



STRUGGLE AND VICTORY. 

I SIT within my idle chair 
In softest sackcloth bound ; 
I fold my hands, I wear the air 
Of one by patience crowned ; 
So lowly meek, no need to be 
A finer-strained humility. 

Alas ! it is an outward guise : 
Within the soul, within 



•^ 



STRUGGLE AND VICTORY. 261 

Cowers Sorrow with her torrent eyes ; 

And jeer with dance and din 

Old scarlet pride and yellow shame, 

And spotted fears and cares ; 

I pin them with a will of flame, 

I pile the iron bars. 

Alas ! I am so still and mild, 

While hidden robber bands 

Of discontent make havoc wild, 

All wring their fettered hands : 

I rise, I rise on wings of fire ; 

I bid them bide or die ! 

Where art Thou, eternal Sire ? 

Shall sorrow last for aye ? 

Why soar the birds at prayer in vain, 

And faint beneath the tempest's strain. 

Nor find an opening sky ? 

Ah, hush ! the evil midnight feet 
Steal o£E in slow, reluctant beat. 
And in the Orient overhead 
Group noble visitants instead : 
They fill the air and softly say, 
The light is lightening to the day. 
The house is swept and garnished, come I 
The happy angels are at home. 
1867. 



262 POEMS. 

THE OLD AND NEW LEARNING. 

Shut off the soft, white book, 

The fair poetic page, 

The rhythmic joy, the wisdom dear 

Wrought out from depth of pain and fear ; 

I am a bird in cage : 

Shut off the soft, white book, 

The fair, poetic page. 

These brains were brains of fire, 

Their lips were wet with wine ; 

I had my heart's desire, 

I touched their timbrels fine ; 

They sat as gods above, 

I stood as helot bound. 

Then rose with censer swinging. 

My inmost soul onflinging, 

A helot in love's fetters bound, 

And them with garlands crowned. 

And prayerful eyes that sought to die 

And hft the veU of leaden skies 

That hid from men the golden eyes, 

The golden kings of Poesy. 

A freedman now, I turn 

To thee, Lord, to learn : 

Spread out thy primer old. 

Show forth the lessons bold ; 

My eye is dim with tears. 

Make large the characters ; 

My sense is dull with time, 



HANNIBAL. 263 

Point with thy hand sublime. 

Say softly, one by one, 

The unused brain shall follow on ; 

Spread out thy primer wide, 

Thy nursling stands beside, 

And longs to say the old refrain, 

(A freedman with his broken chain,) 

Waiting the word that setteth free, 

The perfect law of liberty, 

And humbly ask the mystic key 

That shall interpret Fate and Thee. 



HANNIBAL. 

SU<5GESTEB BY A PHOTOGRAPH FROM AN ANTIQUE 
BUST. 

O LARGE, sad brow ! deep and mournful eyes ! 

The burden of a ruined nation lies 

Within thy glance, the anguish and the strain. 

The wrestle with despair, the struggle sore and vain ! 

Why mov'st me thus, man of ages old ? 
'Twixt me and thee the floods of time have rolled. 
And left their debris on the weary earth, — 
The task incessant, toil to death from birth ; 
Heroic souls, like unto thine, whose doom 
Has flashed in glory and gone out in gloom ! 

ancient hero, bowed in thought and care, 

Single through genius, great through great despair ; 



264 POEMS. 

Foreign in form, in garb, in speech and song, 

Alien to music of my mother-tongue ; 

Thy God not mine, my hope of heaven not thine, 

O soldier, born to do great deeds in Time ! 

Yet ever to my thought thy face shall be 

The symbol of our one Humanity ! 

The poor, grand soul of man, when hope is high, 

Forever seeks his dream to satisfy. 

His vision to mature, his plan to meet 

Its reason in success, in end complete. 

Then, amid sinews stretched and torn in vain, 

Asks the great why and wherefore of his pain. 



TO REV. NATHANIEL HALL, 

ON THE FORTIETH AlfNIVERSABT OP HIS MINISTRY, 
JULY 16, 1875. 

They come with girded memories, 

Come crowding all the ways ; 
Keen glancing from their spirit-eyes. 

The train of vanished days ! 

They come, a grave and longsome band, 

The torches blink and glow. 
Bringing their scroU upon their hand. 

Their record on their brow. 

In quivering lines looms up the morn, 
When first, 'mid hope and cheer. 



TO REV. NATHANIEL HALL. 265 

The prophet mantle wrapped thy form, 
And touched thy lips with fire. 

O earnest toil and graceful word, 

And face that inly shone ; 
O prayers that found the heart of God, 

Like nestlings in their home ! 

From shine of joy and dark of woe. 

We plait the tender rays, 
And place the halo round thy brow, 

O crowned with love and praise ! 

Tell forth, departed days, the tale ; 

Read out his record true ! 
A perfume floateth from the page ; 

The leaves are fresh like dew. 

O clean from worldliness and guile, 

O true to prayer and hymn ! 
The burdened years look back and smile 

Through all their archway dim. 

The wondrous shadow of thy past 

Is filled with grateful eyes, — 
A bower of noble memories, 

A tent of Heaven's surprise. 

In tones as reverent and sweet, 

Ring out thy sunset bells. 
As when they called thy early feet 

Across the morning hills. 



266 POEMS. 

Take up thy meed of fair renown ! 

Soon God's imperial tone 
Shall bid thee lay these flowerets down 

For guerdon of his own ; 

When all memorials of time, 
All human praise and worth, 

Shall shrivel in the cleansing flame 
Of his descending breath. 

O tenderness divinely deep, 

That folds the child away, 
The child-soul to its dreamless sleep, 
To waken to tJiat day. 
Percival Avenue, Dorchester. 



WRITTEN FOR A SUNDAY-SCHOOL AN- 
NIVERSARY. 

Ever through years, or more or less, 
The supple forms of childhood press, 
In happy homes, by hearth and stair. 
With winsome eyes and shining hair. 

Ever through smiles and toils and tears, 
Childhood glides onward into years ; 
And steps mature, their labors done, 
Yield to the young feet hurrying on. 

O Thou, who see'st, as turn by turn 
Bloom speeds to flower and flower to germ. 



VIRGIN AND CHILD. 267 

Save up the sweetness of our prime, 
The graces of our childhood's time, 

And give them back, more soft and fair, 

To deck the soul beyond compare, 

When, cleansed from earth, we drink the wine. 

Anew with Thee, of life divine. 



VIRGIN AND CHILD. 

Oh, look not back on childhood's hour 
As if that soft, chaotic prime 
Were God's high festival in time, 
The giving of Himself in dower. 

Oh, tender be the guarding wing 
That broods above this charming fay, 
This creature made by Him, the King, 
To grow in stature to the day, — 

To grow and open, layer on layer, 
Fold within fold, until the core 
Of inmost being shows the rare. 
High effluence of the human flower. 

The soul evolved by sun and storm, 
By fire to fire itself refined. 
Expands unto the virgin form. 
That waits the passing of the wind, — 



268 POEMS. 

Alone, apart, absorbed, awaits 
The Gabriel from the Presence, come 
Bringing a message from the gates 
That unto her a child is born. 

O wondrous symbols ! sacred bands ! 
Eternal as the heavens and earth, 
The angel, tj'pe of wondering faith, 
With drooping brow and clasping hands 
Salutes the mother of his Lord, 
The virgin, waiting for the word. 

This is the child that art divine 
Forever seeks, forever sees : — 
The Soul in fullness of its time 
The incarnated Law receives, 
The infancy of Life divine. 



ON MISS PEABODY'S EIGHTIETH 
BIRTHDAY. 

We thought to grace her silver hair 

An autimin leaf to bring. 
But lo ! a presence unaware 

Steals in with sounds of spring. 

We thought in soft and tender hues 

To touch the past to tears, 
But colors bright as jewels use 

Light up her house of years. 



AGE. 269 

For hope and heart, for love and lore, 

That scarce knew stint or stay, 
For vistas widening more and more, 

We give her thanks to-day. 

Others may win in later hour, 

Her meed of wealth and fame ; 
The purest fragrance of the flower 

Shall float around her name. 

Within the frail and aging form, 

From out the darkening eyes. 
Her spirit moves alert and warm 

To face the lifting skies. 

Of work sublime in homes above, 

More hearts to wake and win, 
Open, ye folding-doors of love. 

And pass your votary in ! 



AGE. 

The fancies, nimble, fresh, and young, 
That turned all feeling into song ; 
The quick heartbeats that found in breath 
Of cadenced verse a facile sheath ; 
The lavish love that light and warm, 
Like mistiness of early morn, 
Rounded to grace each passing form ; 
The eye that saw in other eyes 
The rapture of its own surprise ; 



270 POEMS. 

And ear that melted every sound, 
Mere floatings in the air around, 
To one pure tone without alloy, 
The perfect tone of inward joy, — 
All these are gone, as gone away 
The roses of that other day, 
Ideal fruits and flowers that grew 
In gardens that our childhood knew. 

grace of life ! O pretty sheen ! 

1 thank the high, the wise Control 
That your soft nurturing hath been. 
Your downy cradling of the soul. 

I make no moan for glint or gleam ; 
(Let music pass, let rainbows die ;) 
I have no wail for vanished dream, 
For rose on cheek or fire in eye. 
We leave our playthings in the sim, 
We face the heaven of truth's abode 
The veil is lifting from the throne. 
We touch the very feet of God ! 



REPLY TO A CHRISTMAS GREETING. 

O GIFTED eyes with genius fraught, 
To catch where'er the hint divine. 
And read thy God's ascending thought 
Through silvery mote or quivering line ! 

O joyful heart that out the storm 
Knows the high arch of light will come 



FAITH AND HOPE. 271 

And let its gentle glory down 
To win the fainting spirit home ! 

O prophet soul that wise and well 
Sees the ripe grapes within the germ, 
Oh, what thy radiant fancies spell, 
So does the Lord of Life discern ! 



FAITH AND HOPE. 

Enchanting form with silver wings 
Woven of morning light and air, 
Of all earth's freshest, fairest things. 
The fairest one to win and wear ! 

O darling Hope ! who dare deny 
Thy perfect touch and angel guise ? 
The poetry of earth and sky 
Fades with the fading of thine eyes. 

Yet does thy ringing voice grow less. 
The carols sound more faint and dim, 
As pain and sorrow and distress 
Flood their dark gohlet to the brim. 

Then steps into thy seat, o'erthrown 
By cruel rush of earth's despair, 
A silent, grave, and reverent form, 
A vision more sublimely fair ; 



272 POEMS. 

And Faith, the soul's perfected dower, 
(Not greed of gain or fear of ill,) 
Awaits within the present hour 
The mandates of the perfect Will. 
1886. 



ODE. 

Thou living Truth and vital Power ! 
We cling unto thy changeless breast, 
The phantoms of a mortal hour, 
And find immortal life and rest. 

Our fathers spoke their thought of thee 
In words austere, with lips aglow, 
And told in prayer, on bended knee. 
The mystic tale of human woe. 

We, children of a later hour. 
Seek in soft speech and gentler tongue 
To veil the splendor of thy power, 
And do thy brooding love no wrong. 

Our fathers caught with straining ear 
The echoes of the Sinai storm. 
And we a rarer music hear, — 
The worship of the Life new-born. 

But guard us, thou living Lord, 
If, lost our silken lines among, 



ODE. 273 

We miss the high, heroic chord 

That through their manly accents rung. 

Shone on their brows the fervid beam 
Of truth, in human symbols given ; 
Oh, guard us, lest earth's tender sheen 
Shut off that grander light of heaven. 



